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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SERMONS ADDRESSED TO INDIVIDUALS 



SERMONS 
ADDRESSED 

TO 
INDIVIDUALS 



BY Sb^' 

REGINALD jf CAMPBELL 

MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE 
LONDON 



NEW YORK 

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

3 and 5 West i 8 th Street, near 5™ Avenue 
1905 



t;s* 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies fiaceivtse 

JAN 1? 1905 
Ooyyrigm tmy 

GUSS /j XXc, Nor 
GOPY B/ 



Copyright, 1904, by 
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 



Published, Dece??iber , igo4 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 031710 



THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

It is often asserted that sermons as a rule make 
very poor reading. Somehow they seem to lose 
their human interest when they pass into the 
printed page and the personality of the preacher 
is withdrawn. Such, of course, is not always the 
case, as the sermons of Spurgeon, Phillips Brooks, 
and Robertson of Brighton clearly testify; but it 
must be admitted that these are the exception, not 
the rule. Most sermonic literature is dry reading, 
or if it be the reported verbatim utterance of the 
preacher — and this is not literature — the colloquial- 
isms and direct style of address have a tendency to 
become irritating to the reader. This tendency is 
especially noticeable if reported sermons are issued 
in permanent form. 

With these considerations in view something in 
the nature of an experiment is being attempted in 
the issue of the present volume. The sermons 
included herein are not literature, they are ex- 
tempore speech; they are face to face teaching 
and exhortation addressed to an audience which, 
at the time, and to the preacher, consisted as it 
were of but one individual. They are human 
documents called forth by living human experiences. 

v 



vi PREFACE 

Every one of these sermons came into existence 
because some one asked for it or some life story 
suggested it. It is the preacher's conviction that 
in this way the Holy Spirit breathed upon the 
word. Every sermon bore fruit in blessing re- 
ceived and acknowledged. They are now sent 
forth upon a further mission, and in the hope that 
some who read them may be helped thereby. A 
short account of the origin of each is prefixed to 
every text. By this method, perhaps, readers who 
might otherwise fail to grasp their true significance 
may enter in some degree the mental atmosphere 
breathed by the congregation which heard them. 
In no other respect have they been altered. They 
are mere transcripts of the oral delivery, and, as 
such, must be their own justification. 

That they may be used again to our Saviour's 
greater glory is the author's prayer. 



CONTENTS 



QUO VADIS? . , 

II 
THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 



• • 



III 
THE WINDOWS OPEN TOWARDS JERUSALEM . . 35 

IV 
THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER .... 49 



A FORFEITED GIFT 



• • • 71 



VI 
THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD ... 87 

VII 
SOME GREAT THING 105 

VIII 
ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND ETERNAL LIFE . 127 

IX 

THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION . . , .149 

vii 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 



169 



XI 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 



189 



XII 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 



205 



XIII 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 



225 



XIV 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 



241 



XV 



A SINFUL GOD 



■ • 



2 57 



XVI 

THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 



2 75 



XVII 



ONENESS WITH GOD 



295 



XVIII 



INWARD TRUTH 



313 



QUO VADIS? 



It is my custom to remain at the City Temple on Thursday 
afternoons in order to see and converse with such callers as may 
wish for a private interview. This is almost the only way in 
which pastoral work is possible to me, unless my correspondence 
column in the British Weekly can be accounted pastoral work. 
The geographical situation of the church is such, and the distances 
from which members come lie so widely apart, that anything like 
ordinary pastoral visitation is out of the question. But there are 
some compensations in this fact. One of them undoubtedly is that 
in the face to face and heart to heart conversations in the vestry, 
minister and caller get to understand each other without much 
waste of time. Few will take the trouble to come unless they 
have some serious purpose in doing so : there are no preliminaries 
to be got over ; no apologies for introducing religious matters ; no 
false assumptions about the conventionalities of the occasion; we 
can go at once to the point. 

Through this method I have learned much. So far as one is 
able to judge, God has blessed it more obviously than the pulpit 
work out of which it grew. This may not be so in reality, but 
the results are more easily estimated, and the personal relations 
established are of a more sacred character. 

The following sermon was preached on a Thursday morning 
in 1903 ; it grew out of some meditation on certain tendencies of 
the time and the contradictory advice given as to the proper way 
to deal with them. Dr Josiah Strong's work was beginning to 
be discussed. Dr Watson and others were reiterating with 
emphasis that the Church must adjust herself to a new situation 
and new problems. Mr Hall Caine had been arousing the en- 
thusiasm of an audience of social workers by his criticism of the 
supineness of organised Christianity. Not more than usual, per- 
haps, were such speeches being made, but more of them had come 
my way. I was of opinion then, as I am now, that vague charges 

3 



against the churches would do but little to solve the great prob- 
lem of the social needs of the hour. Outsiders taunt the churches 
with their failure, and the churches themselves are in the mood 
to acknowledge it. Where then is the mischief? Preachers and 
Christian workers are quite ready to be shown what to do if 
anyone with clear vision can point out the way. My own view 
is that this new susceptibility which the churches are exhibiting 
towards a longing for a better and a healthier religious life marks 
the beginning of a better day. In fact it is the Word of the Lord 
for us at this moment, but our answer to His call must be an 
individual one. We are enquiring what the Lord means us to 
do for this generation. Are we prepared individually to do the 
one thing, whatever it may be, which He reveals to us as the 
answer to our prayer? 

I remember saying this to two gentlemen who repeated in my 
hearing, and that of the deacons, on the previous Sunday, some 
of the criticisms of the churches hinted at above. They had been 
struck with the possibilities of the City Temple if the congrega- 
tion were to act together as one great organised force. "What 
are you doing yourselves?" I replied. "Christ never waits for 
organisations." 

The situation here described was paralleled in the Upper Room, 
and in the profound moral significance of our Lord's repetition 
of the disciples' question, "Whither goest Thou?" 



"Now I go My way to Him that sent Me, and none of you 
asketh Me, Whither goest Thou?" — John xvi. 5. 

These strange words fell from the lips of our 
Master almost as a kind of interruption or aside in 
the course of His valedictory address in the upper 
room; yet they are full of luminous suggestion. 
Their true relevance is only seen when we call to 
mind the circumstances under which they were 
spoken. In order to make clear what those circum- 
stances were, I will read three extracts from this 
wonderful part of the New Testament, St John's 
Gospel. The question, "Whither goest thou?" 
was put to our Lord at least twice before He 
uttered the words which form our text. On the 
first occasion, the question came from the lips of 
Simon Peter: "Lord, whither goest Thou?" (John 
xii. 36). On the second occasion, the question was 
put to him inferentially by Thomas the Doubter; 
the remonstrance of the Apostle was couched in 
this phrase: "Lord, we know not whither Thou 
goest; and how can we know the way?" (John 
xiv. 5). How, then, could our Master, after these 
two interrogations, say to the same group of men, 
and on the same occasion, "None of you asketh 
Me, Whither goest Thou?" They had asked Him 
twice, and on neither occasion had He satisfied their 



6 QUO VADIS 

questioning. I take it that the explanation is this. 
Our Lord had something of solemn import to say 
to the disciples in the upper room, and they were 
not prepared to hear it — perhaps not so much 
prepared as He had a right to expect. In that 
tender ejaculation, "I have many things to say unto 
you, but ye cannot bear them now," I catch a tone 
of rebuke. They were not in the mood to listen, 
their thoughts were earth-bound, and even their 
love of their Master robbed them at this moment 
of the true spiritual perspective which He wished 
them to attain unto. For our Lord's eye was fixed 
upon the glory that was to be; for the joy that was 
set before Him He already in anticipation had en- 
dured the Cross and despised the shame, and was 
set down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. 
Our Lord was looking past Gethsemane, beyond 
Pilate's hall, past Calvary's hill, past even the tomb 
and the Resurrection morning. He was looking to 
the glory land and to that wider ministry which He 
is exercising in our midst to-day. "I go My way 
unto Him that sent Me, and it is expedient for you 
that I go away." But is it wonderful that the 
Apostles could not share in this magnificent vision 
that the Master was taking at this moment? He 
was compelled to pause, for their questionings were 
missing the mark every time that they were made. 
In the first instance He announced His approaching 
departure, but Peter, confused at the thought of 
the ministry which was now, as he thought, reach- 



QUO VADIS 7 

ing its zenith of success from an earthly point of 
view, interposes the question, "Now, Master, where 
are You going? Is it to Samaria? Is it to Rome? 
Are You going to repeat there the triumphs of the 
Galilean ministry? Shall we see a crowd welcoming 
the Jewish Messiah, even into the imperial city, 
with hosannas, just as to-day You have been 
welcomed into Jerusalem? Whither goest thou, 
Master? Let us go and share in the success and 
the glory too/' This was not altogether a selfish 
proposition, either, for Peter really did love his 
Master, but the full significance of his Master's 
work he had yet to learn. 

The gloomier doubter, when, little by little, our 
Lord returned to the solemnity of the real farewell 
that He was about to speak, voices the puzzled feeling 
of the disciples in the expostulation : "Lord, we know 
not whither thou goest ; we should be glad to go with 
you, but we do not know the way." How much 
clearer would it become — perhaps not much — to his 
puzzled intellect, when the Master replied : "I am the 
Way and the Truth and the Life. No man cometh 
unto the Father but by Me. I go My way unto Him 
that sent Me?" This stopped their questioning; 
they did not wish to hear the word of farewell, and 
it gradually became clear to them that the Master 
was really going. This was the end of the earthly 
ministry; no more teaching upon the hillsides of 
Galilee, no more crowds — thousands strong — press- 
ing upon Him to hear His words; no more brief 



8 QUO VADIS 

authority for these disciples ; and, above all, what was 
to become of the Messianic kingdom in which they 
had expected to play so august a part? It was all 
coming to an end. Hence the questioning stopped, too. 
This good-bye is not temporary, it is final; there 
is not a new ministry to be commenced in Samaria 
or in Rome; Jesus is withdrawing Himself from the 
gaze of men. If there is to be a ministry it is no 
longer to be a visible ministry; and all of a sudden 
it came to these simple Galileans that the world 
would be a blank to them without Christ; they 
ceased questioning, for sorrow had filled their 
hearts. Now, you see — shall I call it? — the 
psychology of the situation. The Master, with 
His tender smile, looked upon the men who had 
eagerly offered themselves a few minutes before, 
questioning where He was going, that they might 
accompany Him. "Lord, why cannot I follow Thee 
now? I will lay down my life for Thy sake." The 
answer, in effect, was, "You are not ready; before 
the cock crow thou shalt thrice deny that thou 
knewest Me." When it came to the real good- 
bye, and they felt that the Jesus they had known 
and loved and followed was to be removed from 
them, is it any wonder that their self-offering and 
their affectionate questioning came to an end? 
"Why don't you go on with your questioning? 
Twice you have asked Me whither I am going; 
now when I make it clear that I go My way unto 
Him that sent Me, the questioning has stopped; 



QUO VADIS 9 

none of you asketh Me, Whither goest Thou? And 
yet this, if you could only see it, is the best news 
that I have spoken to you this night. It is ex- 
pedient for you that I go away. The ministry has 
not come to an end; it is only beginning. The 
Christ is to reign: have you faith enough to come 
with Me through the darkness? There is a glory 
dawning; by-and-bye the Comforter is coming; 
the Christ shall be lifted up, and all men shall be 
drawn unto Him. And ye are My witnesses; for 
ye have been with Me from the beginning." If 
these simple men had only known it, now was 
their opportunity. Their questionings were missing 
the mark, they had not realised what the Master 
said, and He was telling them in this moment of 
farewell of a coming nearness, transcending anything 
ever yet known of their earthly Master in His 
Galilean days. 

I want to> apply the words very intimately and 
specially to your case and mine. Spoken nineteen 
hundred years ago, they have as fresh a significance 
to-day as when Peter and Thomas first heard them. 
He who spake them is gone; there is no Jesus 
here; taken by wicked hands and crucified and 
slain, He no longer lives to walk and work amongst 
men. Those who heard Him have gone; the 
body of St Peter has long mouldered into dust. 
Who can say what has become of Thomas the 
Doubter? The men w!k> played the hero for 
Christ in the first ages of the Church, those who 



io QUO VADIS 

saw Him in the flesh and heard these precious 
sayings fall from His lips, have all passed to their 
reward, and now, if these words have any significance 
at all, it is not for them, it is for you and for me. 
Though the Christ is gone, the spirit of the Christ 
remains. I do not wish you to understand that 
word in any vague or unreal sense. Some of the 
men to whom I speak have a very feeble faith 
in my Lord, and I would like to take you with 
me every step that I go when I repeat His words. 
How much could you say with assurance about 
Jesus Christ? Where is He, who is He? About 
the latter of those two questions we have wasted 
a great deal of time. I will ask you to follow me 
in a series of hypotheses. Where is the Christ? 
Grant me two things, and I will tell you. First, 
I want you to say, with Matthew Arnold, "There 
is an Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for 
righteousness." Now, my brethren of the City 
offices, the strenuous life of this vast Metropolis, 
representative as you are of the typical life of 
England, can you say that? You are sure from 
the bottom of your heart that there is, though 
you cannot prove it, an Eternal, not ourselves, which 
makes for righteousness. You would say that 
much? Take another step, which is but the same 
proposition, and affirm with the Victorian poet, 

" To feel, although no tongue can prove, 
That every cloud that spreads above, 
And veileth love, itself is love." 



QUO VADIS in 

Say this also. Our life has a significance far beyond 
our present apprehension of it, and every life has 
value for God. We have an immortal destiny. 

" Life is real, life is earnest, 
And the grave is not its goal, 
' Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' 
Was not spoken of the soul." 

You may think very little about the world's to- 
morrow, and you may be far more concerned about 
your own to-day than you may be about any after 
death, but while you affirm with me those two 
things — there is a Righteousness enthroned some- 
where, and there is a better day for you and me — 
if you can only say that much, you have already 
come to close quarters with the Christ. It is a 
marvellous thing that every time a man proceeds 
to ask any question concerning the fundamentals of 
his own being and destiny he is at grips with Jesus. 
It is impossible that it should be otherwise. We 
have identified — or if you won't pass that word, 
let us say associated — Jesus with the Eternal that 
makes for righteousness, and if there is a deathless 
life for any, then Jesus, whoever He may be, is 
alive somewhere. Now, supposing it is Jesus the 
Carpenter, and only He, who lives somewhere, it is 
a question of the gravest import for you and me 
what that Christ is thinking about this world, and 
how much He can do to affect our destiny. Only 
suppose that He happens to be the director of that 
destiny, can you think of any question so important, 



12 QUO VADIS 

so urgent, as this, Where is the Christ leading His 
own ? Whither goest Thou, my Lord ? 

I have brought into the pulpit with me a book, 
written on a subject that does not concern us for a 
moment; it is not a religious book, unless, perhaps, 
very indirectly, but a book on a scientific subject, 
and I take from it this sentence : 

"There is nothing to hinder the reverent faith that, though we 
be all children of the Most Highest, He came nearer than we, 
by some space to us immeasurable, to that which is infinitely far." 

I am not going to ask any man here for any more 
theology than that "He stands nearer, by some 
space to us immeasurable, to that which is infinitely 
far." Now suppose — I am going on with my 
hypotheses — suppose, instead of Jesus, I was talking 
about your father or mother or child who had passed 
into the unseen and to the Eternal that makes for 
righteousness ; if your father is really there, if the 
grave does not hold him, if your mother's lips have 
not been silenced for evermore, your father is 
thinking and your mother is praying about you. 
You cannot imagine them to be changed; the child 
has not forgotten the love that you once gave, and 
the parents can never forget the solicitude they 
once showed for you who are bone of their bone, 
flesh of their flesh. Now suppose — only suppose — 
that the Christ who once taught in Galilee, the 
Christ who gathered this little circle of men round 
Him in that upper room, even if He be only Jesus 



QUO VADIS 13 

the Carpenter, has gone into the unseen with the 
same spirit that He showed in the days of old, with 
the same deathless love, with the same yearning 
solicitude to save men; does it matter, or does it 
not, what this Man, whose name is lifted above all 
the names that are in the earth, is thinking and 
doing about this world? I cannot stop here; some- 
thing impels me to take the last step, for faith 
urges me to say: He is thinking and He is doing. 
His is the name above every name, that to which 
every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall con- 
fess Christ Jesus as Lord. He is the Master of our 
fate, the Lord of life and death. Now what is 
Jesus doing? To the question that stands before 
all other questions, "Lord, whither leadest Thou?" 
the signs of the times ought to afford us the answer. 
It is never easy for a man to estimate the conditions 
of his own day; we are too near to the facts. For 
instance, I think it is most likely that Mr Cham- 
berlain will loom larger in the estimate of posterity, 
possibly, than in that of this day and generation. 
We did not know how great Mr Gladstone was 
until we came to think of him as a. figure in history; 
now we are getting a right perspective as we look 
back. But the perspective is not easy to get when 
we stand in the midst of big events. It is not easy 
to estimate, then, the signs of the times, but per- 
haps a good way of trying to discover the prevailing 
mood of our own time is to look back a little while 
and see how it compares with that which is past. 



14 QUO VADIS 

In the middle of the last century England was in 
a temper somewhat different from the temper which 
she exhibits to-day. In 1846 the Corn Laws had 
just been abolished, and from that moment a new 
era of hopefulness and prosperity dawned for our 
historic nation. Not this country only, but other 
countries, shared in the buoyancy of spirit which 
came like the dawning of the morning to a weary 
world. France took a step forward in the inaugura- 
tion of a new Constitution; nationalities in Europe 
were struggling into political liberty; young Italy 
was looking to this country as an example; and we 
— what were we doing? Albert the Good was 
just inaugurating that first experiment in inter- 
national friendly competition and goodwill — the Great 
Exhibition of 185 1. The other day a man, who 
was then in early manhood, told me that, speaking 
for his contemporaries, he could say men were filled 
with hopefulness; they felt the golden age was 
just at hand. Moreover, there was a great con- 
fidence in the future of our own country; men, 
praying for an era of peace, thought of England 
as being the leader and the guide of the civilisation 
of the world. A good spirit was abroad, a hopeful 
spirit, one of alertness, buoyancy, confidence. What 
became of it? In 1854 we had the Crimean War 
— a blunder; worse than a blunder, a crime, as we 
have now discovered; in 1857 we na< ^ the Indian 
Mutiny; in 1870 the Franco-German War, and in 
1878 the Russo-Turkish W T ar, with its long legacy of 



QUO VADIS 15 

atrocities. All our hopes have been damped. The 
education of the people has not wrought the results 
that were expected. The buoyancy and confidence 
that existed in this country in 1848 appear to have 
crossed the ocean, and are now the characteristic 
of our cousins in America. A certain misgiving, 
apparently, is in the minds of some of the best 
men to-day, that perhaps we are witnessing the 
beginnings of national decay. In religion, what do 
we see? The Rev. Frank Ballard states it as his 
opinion that the vast mass of the workers amongst 
our fellow-countrymen are being increasingly alien- 
ated from the Church. He says it is not definite 
hostility so much as indifference and contempt which 
they show to us and to our methods. If we have 
lost the note of confidence and hopefulness, that 
verve, that glamour of enthusiasm which has again 
and again in the history of the world swept over 
the people that were making history, we must get 
it back. For, be assured no nation can long stand 
which ceases to believe in her mission. England 
has had something to do for God — may it be that 
the churches are asking the wrong questions of 
their Master to-day, and failing to read Him in the 
signs of the times? Christ has to do, not now and 
then, but all the time, with the making of history 
for He is the Master of the destiny of nations as 
of individuals, and He rides on the whirlwind and 
directs the storm. If we can read the signs of the 
times aright, we hear our Master's call from out the 



16 QUO VADIS 

midst of the conditions of our own day, "This do 
and thou shalt live." 

What shall we do? There are many amongst us 
anticipating an evangelical revival, a great stirring 
of the religion which is ineradicable present in the 
hearts of men in all ages. What form will this 
revival take? On one hand, we hear one thing, 
and on another, another. Sometimes the Church 
is blamed for her slackness in the preaching of the 
old evangel; sometimes she is blamed in that she 
has not succeeded in getting the ear of the masses 
as her Master did by adapting her message to their 
needs. An article was put into my hands only five 
minutes before I came into the pulpit, curiously 
enough, written upon the very theme upon which 
I am addressing you — What form the next revival 
will take. There will be one, of that you may be 
perfectly sure, Church or no Church. Peter and 
Thomas in this chapter are asking the right ques- 
tion, it may be, "Lord, whither goest Thou?" 
and were almost ready with the answer: "To 
Samaria or to Rome — to this shibboleth, or to that; 
Lord, we are prepared to accompany you, and to 
repeat them as we have always done." And the 
Master's answer may be coming now as it came to 
them, "Because I have said these things, sorrow 
has filled your heart." Before I read the article I 
am about to quote, let me take you back to John 
xvi., and see why it was that sorrow had filled their 
hearts — partly because the Master was going, but 



QUO VADIS 17 

partly because the glory was going with Him. Peter 
had just been sharing in the hosannas; he wanted 
more, and this is what he received: — "The time 
shall come when he that killeth you will think that 
he is doing a service unto God. These things have 
I told you, that when the time shall come you may re- 
member that I told you of them. But because I have 
said these things" — not only that He was going, 
but that something else was coming, a strenuous 
time, a time of trial — sorrow had filled their hearts. 
Peter was ready for the Mount of Transfiguration, 
ready for the hosannas and the palm-branches, but 
he was not yet ready for the Cross. Yet the time 
did come when Peter was ready to testify, suffer, 
and die, for his Lord. 

Now, supposing Peter were here to-day to put 
the question to the Master, "Lord whither goest 
Thou?'' — for where He is I must go; help me to 
fulfill the destiny which Christ has declared to the 
generation in which I was born. The answer is 
this. "There will be a revival," says Dr Watson, 
better known as Ian Maclaren. 

"When God is pleased to send His new Prophet, one expects 
that he will preach the Gospel of social deliverance ; that the 
white female slaves who sew from morning till night, and half 
through the night, and hardly get the wherewithal to keep soul 
and body together, should be delivered from their bondage, that 
every labourer who is willing and temperate should have his 
living wage wherewith to keep himself and his family, that every 
citizen of England, however humble, should have his own little 
home wherein to live in peace and comfort, that the countryman 



18 QUO VADIS 

should not be evicted from the land to make room for wild 
animals and rich men's sport, that the owners of insanitary prop- 
erty should be punished and not compensated, that temptations 
should not be placed at every street corner in the way of the poor 
and miserable, that every man should have free access to educa- 
tion, to the country, to health and just enjoyment, and that the 
burden of weariness and sickness and tyranny should be lifted 
from the shoulders of them who labour and are heavy laden. 
From this preaching, when it comes with power, two classes will 
receive a blessing. . . . When Christianity has at a great cost 
given a home to the humblest of the people, she will find a wel- 
come home in the people's heart." 

All this means some cost to the individual. It is 
easy for any man to put his finger on the difficulty 
to-day, and to say how others should solve it; but 
the call comes to us each by each and one by one. 
"Simon, Son of Jonas," said the Master, "lovest 
thou Me more than these? Tend my sheep, feed 
my lambs." No fear of the dying down of moral 
enthusiasm; the Christ is leading, and the spirit of 
Christ is inspiring every heroic service for the King. 
You who would serve the Master, serve the Master's 
own. We call for the union of all who love in the 
cause of all who suffer. Don't let us misplace our 
question, "Lord whither goest Thou?" The signs of 
the times afford the answer. We cannot but follow 
where Jesus has led. There is a Roman Catholic 
legend as to the martyrdom of the Apostle Peter, 
which runs thus: St Peter was urged by his fellow- 
Christians in Rome, when martyrdom was imminent, 
to flee the city and take refuge from the last dread 
ordeal. Finally he succumbed to the appeal, and 



QUO VADIS 19 

was about to flee from the headsman's axe, when he 
fell asleep, and dreamed that he had escaped the 
city. Outside, in the Appian Way, he met his 
Master's form coming towards the Rome he had just 
left, and Peter uttered the words of his question 
in the upper room, "Lord, whither goest Thou?" 
The answer of the Master was, "I go to Rome to 
be crucified a second time.'' Peter bowed his head 
before the Master, and said, "Lord, be it far from 
Thee. I shall go." He turned back. When he 
woke from his dream he no longer desired to escape 
martyrdom; he was crucified for Christ. Beloved, 
we are called to be crucified with Christ. There is 
no escape. In the practical things of this world, 
doing the right, the loving, the kind, and the true, 
will always cost. It has to be faced, and it must be 
done, if we would follow where He leads. There is a 
familiar picture called the Via Dolorosa; the central 
figure is the Christ leading a suffering, groaning, 
agonised multitude. The Cross is upon His shoulder, 
and in the darkness of that sombre avenue men and 
women are toilsomely, painfully creeping behind 
Him along the Via Dolorosa to a better place on 
the further side of the forbidding crags. False to 
the facts! He went forth bearing His Cross, 
standing strong upon His feet. We who follow 
behind Him to the strenuous and the heroic life 
have no need to lie down and toilsomely to creep 
behind the Master. The cure for the pusillanimity 
of the weak, the coward shrinking from high things, 



20 QUO VADIS 

the remedy for dying-down enthusiasms, is to preach 
Christ's salvation, Christ's consolation, Christ the 
Master, the near, the present, the strong Friend. 
He is leading, He is thinking, He is caring. He has 
never ceased to care. And as He cares His call 
comes. Who amongst us is ready to obey? 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 



The following sermon had a very simple origin. From time to 
time members of my congregation send requests for prayer for 
themselves or their friends. Sometimes these requests are accom- 
panied by particulars intended for the minister's eye alone. A 
greater number of these than usual had been received; stories of 
trouble, perplexity and danger. One such note contained a post- 
script, the exact words of which I cannot remember, but conclud- 
ing with the phrase, "Songs of despair." Instantly there came to 
the preacher's mind the hymn that Jesus sang before Calvary — 
no song of despair. 



II 

"And when they had sung an hymn, they went out." — Mark xiv.26. 

This text opens before us an endless vista of 
love and beauty. "And when they had sung an 
hymn, they went out." Think of all that was to 
follow, and remember that Jesus knew it. This 
hymn, whatever it was, was therefore the death-song 
of Jesus. And what was it? There is surprisingly 
little curiosity on the subject. I do not recollect 
that I have ever heard the question asked, What 
was the hymn that Jesus sang on the night of His 
betrayal ? 

It may be that many here have never thought 
about it at all. And yet we every one of us remem- 
ber with a certain sweet sadness the songs of our 
beloved dead, and when they sang them. 

"Jesu, Lover of my soul, 
Let me to Thy bosom fly." 

While I repeat the line, some person present says 
to himself, "Those were the last words my father 
ever uttered." 

" To Him the first fond prayers are said 
Our lips of childhood frame; 
The last low whispers of our dead 
Are burdened with His name." 

33 



24 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

"Rock of Ages cleft for me." While I repeat the 
familiar line that we shall be singing in most of our 
places of worship within the next few days, some- 
one present will be thinking, "That was my mother's 
favourite hymn." We remember these associations 
with the name of Jesus, and we graft them upon our 
memory of the holy dead. Is it not, then, somewhat 
surprising that we never ask what hymn it was that 
He Himself sang in the hour and article of death? 
There is good reason to believe that it was Psalm 
cxviii. It was especially appropriate to the feast 
which Jesus observed with His disciples, and it con- 
tains the very sentence with which the crowds 
greeted Him on that morning or the day before in 
the streets of Jerusalem, "Hosanna! Blessed is He 
that cometh in the name of the Lord." It was being 
sung by more than the little group of disciples in the 
upper room, but it was far more appropriate than 
anyone but Jesus knew, for He sang it alone. The 
steps of His betrayer were even at that moment 
audible as they passed into the night. The grand, 
lonely soul of Jesus, august Son of God, singing in 
the moment of His betrayal; His murderers are 
ready with their swords and staves, the fires are lit 
in the hall of Caiaphas; the very cross is fashioned 
and Calvary's horror is waiting. It was all arranged ; 
there was no justice about the matter; the verdict 
was foreordained by those who had schemed to 
murder Him, and in this terrible moment this is 
what He sings : — 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 25 

"I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. 
. . . This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice 
and be glad in it. . . . God is the Lord, who hath shewed us 
light; bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the 
altar. Thou art my God, and I will praise Thee: Thou art my 
God, I will exalt Thee. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He 
is good, for His mercy endureth for ever." 

This was the song that Jesus sang. 

The death-song of Jesus is, you see, a song of 
triumph uttered before the agony came. He knew 
absolutely that the Father would not fail Him, that 
evil could not prevail, and that the sacrifice would 
be a great victory. But mark this : He could not 
see beyond Calvary. He knew, but He could not 
see. Faith never can do otherwise than that; it 
knows, but it cannot see. He could see the whole 
way right up to Calvary; He knew what He was 
going to do, and that it must be done alone, and as 
Peter and John were singing on either side of Him, 
"Bind the sacrifice with cords," he knew that they 
were going to run away; the moment they stopped 
singing He told them about that, as we read in the 
context; and He knew that He would have to fling 
His strong arm around them, and beg their lives from 
his own murderers. He knew it; He knew about 
the midnight trial, and the travesty of justice; He 
knew the face of the perplexed Roman governor on 
the throne when He, the King, stood before him, as 
an accused criminal. He saw the sea of murderous 
faces round the cross, and He already felt in antici- 
pation the terrible shame of it all. Yet He could 



26 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

not see beyond Calvary. He only knew, "Thou 
wilt not leave his soul in the grave, neither wilt 
Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption" — 
every detail up to Calvary, and not a moment 
beyond it. 

Someone will say, Could Jesus have done less? 
Surely He could see the end from the beginning. 
He foresaw the rending of the tomb. He knew 
how much hung upon His faithfulness, and upon the 
way He fought His conflict through. In a word, the 
whole destiny of humanity rested upon what Jesus 
would do. Could He have done less than He did? 
I answer, No, He could not. But that does not 
lessen my obligation to Him, nor the fitness of its 
expression. Jesus could not have done less just 
because He was Jesus, and because He was so 
noble and pure, and because His purpose had to be 
accomplished to the last detail. So He did not 
shrink from the Cross. He could not have done 
less, nor does this consideration diminish the grandeur 
of His demeanour in the slightest degree. 

Two great mysteries stand out here. First, the 
mystery of His agony. As a Roman Catholic theo- 
logian has put it, the agony in the garden and the 
dereliction on Calvary present to the gaze an ocean of 
sorrow on the shores of which we may stand and 
look down upon the waveless surface, but the 
depths below no created intelligence can fathom. 
Never speak lightly of the agony of Christ, for you 
do not know what it was, nor how terrible, nor how 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 27 

overwhelming even to the Divine Son of God. The 
second mystery is the mystery of His deliverance. 
He saw through the first mystery, but not the second. 
He saw the agony as we never can see it, but He 
did not see beyond. We see the second, but not 
the first. We never can look on Calvary except 
over the empty tomb. We see on this side of the 
Cross; Christ looked on the other. Think, then, of 
the grandeur and the magnificence of that august 
Figure, standing pathetic and lonely in the upper 
room, singing, "Bind the sacrifice with cords, bind 
it to the horns of the altar . . . O give thanks 
unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy 
endureth forever." 

The present Bishop of Worcester somewhere 
says, there was nothing endured by Christ which 
we may not also be called upon to suffer in our 
degree. I ask you to weigh that sentence. In 
fellowship with Christ we may be capable of the 
same grandeur of achievement in our degree; and 
herein consists the principal value of my beautiful 
text, "And when they had sung an hymn, they 
went out." Do you observe the plural number? 
There were twelve men singing, but only One of 
them sang the song as it should be sung. The 
eleven did not know much about it. They pro- 
tested their loyalty, their faithfulness, their fervour 
of devotion, but by-and-bye they forsook Him and 
fled. But that was not the end, thank God. Peter 
and John and the rest had their chance again, and 



28 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

the time came round when they sang the death- 
song of Jesus as they had not sung it before, and 
this was the ring of it: "I have fought a good 
fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the 
faith, I am now ready to be offered. " These terror- 
stricken Galileans who fled from Gethsemane ere 
long became heroes for the Christ, and sang the 
death-song of Jesus in the very face of tyranny and 
shame. The things that had terrified them before 
were mere shadows compared with this. But 
something had changed them: was it not that they 
had learned to sing the death-song of Jesus with 
His own accent, knowing it was but the beginning 
and not the end? 

Looking into the face of this congregation this 
morning, I am conscious of a deep respect for the 
souls that look back at me out of your eyes. What 
tragedies are here; what secret agonies; what 
shame; what betrayal; what desertion; what mid- 
night trial; what Calvary, I know not, but I would 
ask you a question in the spirit of my text: What 
kind of song is your heart singing? Can it sing at 
all? Can you see God anywhere? Or is your 
vision bounded by the cross? I mean the cross on 
which your hopes have been crucified. There are 
some grand things here, if I could only get at them. 
And, by the way, I never remember preaching a 
sermon here, and adducing one single illustration 
from the facts of human life as I know it, without 
someone who was here either coming or writing to 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 29 

me afterwards and saying, "That was my life you 
were describing." Well, I once heard of, but never 
knew, a young father who fought a battle with 
fate on this wise. He was smitten with a deadly 
disease; he knew it, and was told that his only 
chance of life was that he should suffer someone to 
minister to him, and for the rest of his days — short 
days, too — he should take things quietly and rest 
and wait for death. "Let others suffer, and let 
others strive; be still," said the doctor, "that is 
your only chance of life." But he had two little 
babes, so he took another course. He might have 
turned bitter, and cursed and railed against fate, and, 
with it, God. Or he might have pitied himself and 
taken the easier course, and called upon others to 
provide for these his loved ones. But he did not; 
he went out as if nothing had happened, back to his 
work with double intensity. He could not leave his 
children to the mercy of the world. It is not that 
the world is so very unkind, but it forgets. He 
determined they should have their chance when he 
himself was gone. He uttered no complaint; he 
never presented to them any story of his own 
heroism. He just went on with brave heart and 
cheerful face. For years that man sang the death- 
song of Christ, and no martyr going to the stake 
ever sang it better. 

I have also heard of, but never knew, a young 
mother, whose means of livelihood was her gift of 
song, and once when her only child was lying ill at 



30 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

home she had to sing for bread before a gaping 
crowd, and refuse an encore that she might escape 
from the footlights and get back to that suffering 
bedside. When she got there it was only to hear 
that there was no hope. This was the last request 
of her dying child — "Mother, sing to me!" Can 
you think of anything more terrible than that mid- 
night agony? In the very presence of the shadow 
of death the brave little woman gathers her baby to 
her breaking heart and paces that death-room 
singing : — 

" I think when I read that sweet story of old 
When Jesus was here among men, 
How He called little children like lambs to His fold, 
I should like to have been with Him then." 

The child was going home, the mother was to live, 
but it was she and not the child that sang the death- 
song of Jesus, and sang it well for love's sake. 

Compare these two cases, and you can find experi- 
ences in this congregation sufficiently like them to 
make it worth my while to paint the picture. Of 
one such I have heard this very week. A mother 
writes to me, as many people do about the things I 
teach and the things I do not teach, and complains 
that I declare an impossible God, an imaginary God, 
a God, she says, for comfortable Christians. Here 
let me in an aside warn anyone from ever seeking 
to interpret another person's life and labelling it 
either comfortable or stern. You never can change 
places with anyone, and you never can penetrate to 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 31 

the springs of another man's being: only God can do« 
that. But this, in effect, is what she says. I do not 
give you the very words. My heart filled up with 
pity when I read them: "Knowing the struggle I 
have had to keep the wolf from the door, and how 
I prayed my prayers in vain, I have come to the con- 
clusion there may be a God, but He is no< God of 
love, He is a God whose words are pain. If there 
be such a God, I loathe Him with my whole soul. 
My little girl of six has learnt to blaspheme His 
name, and I never rebuke her, rather, I am glad." 
Poor bitter-hearted woman! Do you know, I think 
I can read in a declaration of that kind that she is 
not so far from God as she seems. If a man has 
intensity enough to protest against the heavenly 
Father, the one feeling can be pretty quickly trans- 
lated into the other, and the protest become praise. 
But oh what a mistake she is making now! She 
knows little or nothing of the fellowship of the Cross. 
Has she never heard anything of the meaning of 
Gethsemane and Calvary, or the death-song of 
Jesus? She has refused to sing it, and what is 
worse, she has stifled the song of an angel in the 
heart of her little child. How near together lie 
success and failure in the great moral crisis of life! 
We say of that young father whom I have just 
described, "Could he have done less?" Of course 
he could not; he would have been false to his 
trusteeship if he had. He did exactly what God 
meant him to do; no more than Jesus, could he 



32 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

have done less in the shadow of Calvary. He sang 
the death-song, sang it like a martyr, sang it like a 
saint, and it may be that you and I, sooner rather 
than late, will have our death-song to sing, and to 
go on living. 

I speak this morning to any man or any woman 
who is fronting some terrible thing, who, like Christ 
in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, goes forward 
with a face towards the gleam of light at the end, with 
the demons whispering gibes in your ear. Your prayer 
for strong deliverance is heard; you can meet your 
fate — shall we call it fate? — your lot, with bitterness, 
or you can meet it with the spirit of defiance, which 
is the spirit of the devil all the same. There is 
another way: meet it in the spirit of the Christ; 
rise high to the opportunity. "I shall not die, but 
live, and declare the works of the Lord . . . bind 
the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the 
altar" — and oh — can you say it? — "give thanks 
unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy 
endureth for ever." The Lord would not think 
much of humanity if He gave it only the toys in the 
nursery. He gives us something grander than that; 
it is the fellowship of the Cross. We have nothing 
to do with our own redemption ; we have much to do 
with filling up the measure that is behind. Christ 
fought a battle for us, let us fight our battle with 
Him. 

I would say, then, to any man or woman of broken 
mutilated life, Lift up your heart and listen, listen 



THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 33 

to the death-song of Jesus, which is sung by the 
heavenly choir, the choir of those who have washed 
their robes and made them white in the blood of the 
Lamb. When the organist was playing that lovely 
voluntary this morning, which came with such a 
sweet and quieting devotional influence upon your 
hearts and mine, I thought of something which I 
now suggest to you. If you were to place in this 
pulpit a violin or harp tuned to the pitch of the 
organ above, and leave it alone, not touching it, and 
that voluntary was played again, and you bent your 
ear near to the stringed instrument, seemingly so 
silent, you would hear every note of it coming 
from strings that are swept by the hand of no 
human player. My brethren, you are like the 
harp strung by the hand of God. Keep atune 
with heaven, and you shall sing such a song 
as you will never otherwise sing in this world. 
It is no human hand that sweeps the strings, only 
the Hand that tuned them; and your melody already 
joins with that of the great choir above. 

As my closing application of this beautiful 
message of God, "When they had sung an hymn, 
they went out," let me quote some lines by the Rev. 
V. J. Charlesworth : 

" When friends are few or far away, 

Sing on, dear heart, sing on! 
They rise to sing who kneel to pray, 

Sing on, dear heart, sing on ! 
The songs of earth to heav'n ascend, 



34 THE DEATH-SONG OF JESUS 

And with adoring anthems blend, 
Whose ringing echoes ne'er shall end; 
Sing on, dear heart, sing on ! " 

Yes, even so, sing on, for even now your melody 
is blending with the strains of the multitude that 
no man can number around the throne of God. 



THE WINDOWS OPEN TOWARDS 
JERUSALEM 



The following was a business man's sermon, and preached for the 
sake of an individual. Probably there were many more like him 
in the congregation, but I only knew the one man whom I sought 
to help. He was not a church-goer: that is to say, he attended 
no place of worship on Sundays, although he was a regular at- 
tendant at the Thursday service. Years before he had been put 
out of touch with religious work by some real or fancied affront 
— in fact he seemed to have been rather hardly and unsympathet- 
ically used. He was now willing to make a fresh start, but could 
not help blazing out at the meanness and unscrupulousness of 
the treatment meted out to him in business by professing Chris- 
tians. I still see this hearer sitting in the midst of the city men 
Thursday by Thursday. Whether this particular sermon helped 
him or no I never knew, but it reached one or two young fellows 
who were beginning to find out that success has its penalties, of 
which envy is one. 



Ill 

" Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went 
into his house, and his windows being opened in his chamber 
toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, 
and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did afore- 
time." — Daniel vi. 10. 

The book of Daniel has long been a subject of 
controversy amongst scholars, and is a favourite with 
some who profess to find in it indications concerning 
the political future of the world. For the present, 
however, you and I need not concern ourselves with 
questions of scholarship or prophecy. Our text is 
plain enough; it has a meaning and a value in- 
dependent of both. Neither the scholar nor the 
would-be prophet, foreteller of events I mean, has 
aught to say that can add anything to the force and 
the commanding personal appeal of our text. Let us 
look first at the meaning, and then at the value which 
the meaning indicates. 

Here is a great man, Daniel by name, who is a 
stranger in a strange land, one of a captive people; 
but, like so many of his race, he is found to be useful 
to the reigning house in the country where he now 
is; and so he is preferred before even the subjects 
of the same race as the king himself; and we are 
told the king thought to set him over the whole 
realm. You know enough about human nature to 

37 



38 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

be aware of what would happen. In this case, at any 
rate, the writer of this book was inspired by ex- 
perience. It was with Daniel as with Merlin in 
"The Idylls of the King" :— 

" Sweet were the days when I was all unknown. 
But when my name was lifted up, the storm 
Brake on the mountain, and I cared not for it. 
Right well know I that fame is half disfame, 
Yet needs must work my work." 

Daniel appears to have gone quietly on the path 
which not the king but God had marked out for him; 
lived his life, did his duty. His practice was to keep 
his soul right towards God by this meditation three 
times a day. He would enter into his private room, 
open his window towards Jerusalem, the home of his 
love, in order that he might remind himself of his 
allegiance to the God of Israel, and that he had no 
abiding city in Babylon. What was the king to 
him, and all the king's honour? Yonder, at Jerusa- 
lem, in the service of Israel's God, were Daniel's 
thought and Daniel's hope. 

Now observe the devilry that is set on foot. 
The king loves his talented subject, and so by guile 
Daniel's foes have to make a way through that 
devotion to encompass the destruction of their rival; 
they suggested the king's vanity the way in which 
this might be done. There is to be no prayer for three 
days. Who ever dreams that Daniel would intermit 
his devotion for that? Now can you see them 
slinking round outside the chamber of his devotion 






TOWARDS JERUSALEM 39 

and looking up: "Has he the window open? 
Just what we expected!" "Then they came near 
and told the king." Is not that true to life? You 
do not need to look very far for the meaning of my 
text now; and if the sermon were to stop at this 
point, every one of you could supply the application. 
It is just possible that some man present might be 
saying to himself, "I am sorry you have chosen this 
particular illustration of what human nature knows 
to be true; what a childish tale this is about a man 
being flung into the lions' den and coming out 
unhurt! Tell it to children." Well, I am telling 
it to grown men. It may seem to you altogether 
irrational, but I actually believe it. I remember 
listening to Dr Parker's posthumous message to the 
Free Churches, which contained something of a 
remonstrance against a certain kind of Biblical 
scholarship in these terms : — "We are now told 
that there was no den, that there were no lions, 
and, worst of all, that there was no Daniel." If my 
revered predecessor were here this morning, I would 
point out Daniel to him in the congregation. For 
in this story we have a very vivid picture of ordinary 
human life, and an epitome of the destiny of many 
and many a true servant of God. I am looking into 
the face of some men who are being committed to 
the den of lions, and will find themselves there 
before this afternoon is out. I would talk to them 
as from the heart of God; and this is all I have to 
say. You know where you are going, do you not? 



40 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

You know the writing is signed; open the win- 
dows towards Jerusalem; no compromise with the 
enemy; be as though he were not there. We have 
no abiding city here, but seek a city out of sight. 
You will be a better citizen of this world if you live 
in the full vision of the next. 

Let me take that youngster, perhaps the youngest 
male hearer that I have this morning, and I will tell 
you about his life. He is, as the cynic would say, 
cursed with a conscience. He has just earned his 
little piece of success. He stands well with his 
employer; he has worked hard enough to get there, 
and it seems as if the road is opening before him, 
and life will bring him some good things by-and-bye. 
Here is the enemy. This young man is finding he 
has to pay his price for his success — calumny, petty 
persecution, inflicted in ways which are difficult to 
fix and to face out; and sometimes you are almost 
inclined to turn cynic yourself. Then the preacher 
comes along and says : "Open the windows towards 
Jerusalem. Look back along the line of history to 
One who stood in that fateful city at Pilate's judg- 
ment seat. Consider Him that endured such con- 
tradiction of sinners against Himself; and when He 
was reviled, reviled not again." "Ah, yes!" is the 
response, "but I cannot see Christ in business." I 
am thankful you cannot, unspeakable thankful; for 
if you could, a great moral opportunity that you have 
now would never be yours at all; for persecuted and 
persecutor would both be on the side of Christ, 



TOWARDS JERUSALEM 41 

seeing Him in power and great glory. There is a 
moral value in not knowing too much; mystery hath 
its uses. If you could see things as they actually 
are you would never even talk about the Cross, you 
would not hesitate as to what you ought to do. Do 
it now, as if you could see. Wait a moment. I said 
you could not see Christ. Open the windows toward 
Jerusalem, and gaze through the things that are seen 
to the things that are not seen. Look into the face 
of the Master and you will see something that the 
world cannot see, and it will keep you true. Human 
nature is capable of many damnable things, even 
now; and lest I should be held to be prophesying 
smooth things and telling nursery tales instead of 
God's word, I would just say this: you may have 
worse to suffer yet; this may only be the beginning. 
The writing is signed; you may not know it, or you 
may; go on as if you did not know; go to your 
God; open the windows of your soul heavenward, 
and leave the rest to Him. 

We will take that woman — pure and good — who 
is the breadwinner in a certain family; but she has 
to earn her living for herself and the rest in the 
presence of foul and humiliating insult. Most men 
here will know that I am not imagining this. It is 
true of I know not how many in this sanctuary 
to-day. There are some times when you feel that 
you can bear no more, and will let the consequences 
be what they may; you must retreat from this posi- 
tion of hardship and shame. You have no one to 



42 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

tell. It is astonishing how few there are in the 
world to whom man or woman can disclose their 
whole soul. But as the living has to be won, and 
for somebody else who cannot win it if you do not, 
I think I know what you must do. The writing is 
signed, and it seems as though the lions are waiting; 
but you must go back. Open the windows toward 
Jerusalem; the world does not have it all its own 
way. There is God, and He is just, and He is 
strong. "My God shall supply all your need 
according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus." 
Fear nothing, save to compromise with the Highest. 
Live where He is, for as He is so are we in this 
world. 

Take this business man — to whom I meant to 
speak at first. You are finding every day, as it were, 
the penalty of succeeding in almost anything, it 
matters not what. It seems as if life is all battle. 
What a weary game it is, this making money in the 
City! What a rest, what a relief to get home at 
night and leave the lions for a while! You know 
what professional jealousy means : you know what 
it is to make an implacable, inveterate, unsleeping 
enemy who will hit you under the belt every time 
he can. Sometimes you are tempted to get the 
blow in first, to bring down the standard of conduct 
and right doing and right feeling. Never submit to 
that temptation: it is the business man's par ex- 
cellence. It is so difficult to keep a humble heart, 
a pure spirit, and a childlike attitude to God, when 



TOWARDS JERUSALEM 43 

you are fighting like a man beset on the stricken 
field, and heaven so far away. Well, be the man; 
keep the windows open toward Jerusalem. The 
higher vision will save you from the shame of falling 
in this world of a thousand temptations to the strong 
man. Let the indications be what they may, let 
threatenings be all they seem, your God is stronger 
than they all. God and one make a majority. 

Just as I came up the pulpit stairs, the sexton 
handed me this little spring token 1 from one of my 
City men. I have been looking to this man for 
some time for little loving tokens of this kind. 
From his card I see that he is an Artist and a Scot, 
and his house is named after that little piece of gorse 
I hold in my hand, which by the way a Scotsman 
does not call gorse. It must be a figure of his own life. 
There is the golden flower of success, and here are 
the thorns that make it so I can scarcely hold it. 
It reminds me of the experience of a brother artist 
of this man, told me a little while ago. He has just 
got some plans into the Royal Academy, and he 
showed me the only unfavourable, even a venomous, 
notice of them which appeared in a paper. He 
said, "Would you think that this man is not speak- 
ing his real sentiments at all, perhaps never saw the 
plans? But I happened to pass him in a competition 
a little while ago, and he has been waiting for me 
ever since." Just so, that is the way the world 
does. It is a curious thing that out of all this 

1 A small bouquet of gorse covered with golden blossoms. 



44 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

multitude this morning there is not a single man 
who can say he never had an experience of the 
kind, and never knew what it was to provoke the 
hostility of a man to whom he had never done any 
harm. Nor does it matter; be prepared for that; 
it is the writing that fronts all opportunity for moral 
heroism. The world will never give you any credit 
for the better motive if there are two from which 
to choose. Disinterestedness is seldom believed in. 
What is his game? is the question, if you will 
excuse the homely parlance, that is asked of any 
man's conduct when it even seems to be unselfish. 
But why do people get soured when they find that 
this is so? That is the world's writing: they are 
looking to see if you have your window open. 
Open it as if the world were not there. "Be thou 
as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not 
escape calumny." 

There are some specially trying times in every 
man's life, and it may be that yours — if I speak to 
only one man in this place — has now arrived. Now 
I would most earnestly point out the real danger to 
you in these seasons of trial. It is not what you 
think it is. It is of a double kind. First, that 
evil aimed at you may arouse in you a like evil. 
A sinister mood tends to reproduce itself. Secondly, 
fear of a threatening evil may lead you to bow to 
the storm, and to lower your flag, to turn ever so 
little from the path of strict rectitude. Do not 
succumb to either suggestion. You meet a man 



TOWARDS JERUSALEM 45 

who dislikes you — instinctively you know it — and 
you repay him in kind. Your heart is beating 
quicker when you are in his presence, but it is not 
with a good emotion. Or you hear of a man who 
is scheming to ruin you, and forthwith you hit him 
with all your might. He would never do you any 
harm if there were no ally within your own soul. 
There is a danger from which to flee. To repay 
evil with evil is the worst possible policy you could 
adopt. When our Lord left us the exhortation, 
"Love your enemies; pray for them who despitefully 
use you," He uttered the strictest common sense. 
That is your only way of safety. We have all heard 
Cromwell's dying prayer. Did you ever notice 
how singularly beautiful and noble was the closing 
petition? — "Pardon those who would trample upon 
the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people 
too." It is always difficult to be just to an enemy; 
it cannot be done until you get into that Cromwell 
spirit, which was the Christ spirit before it was his. 
The ignoble thing would be to take a different 
ground, and even in thought to repay evil with evil; 
the noblest, the wisest, the safest, is to take the 
ground that Daniel took. When he knew that 
the writing was signed, he went back into his room 
and opened the windows toward Jerusalem. There 
is always a highest — live there. There is always 
a holiest — look there. Fear nothing, save to 
tamper with your own conscience. Be brave and 
true, and trust in God. "Yea, though I walk 



46 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

through the valley of the shadow of death, I will 
fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and 
Thy staff they comfort me." 

It may be that these City men who have gathered 
within these walls to worship this morning for a 
little while, or some of them, are going back to the 
most trying experience of their life. Well, go; do 
not shirk it; the way to Beulah-land may lie straight 
through the Valley of the Shadow, and if it does 
be sure of this : God will be no nearer in Beulah- 
land than in the dark valley ; and evil can do no more 
in the dark valley than in Beulah-land. As you go 
back to your business to-day, remember to keep 
the windows open toward Jerusalem. 

A year ago, when I first came here, I had on 
Thursday afternoons several At Homes, in order 
to make the acquaintance of friends and visitors, 
and I remember one day a man came in to speak 
to me whom I had never seen before and have 
never seen since. He had a shy, half-shamefaced 
way that often men have in exposing a weak side 
to another man. He said to me, "You were speak- 
ing this morning in a figure thus: You described 
a man hanging from a prison wall all night, dreading 
to drop into safety. I have been hanging on for a 
year or two, dreading to let go, because I feared 
it would not be safety; it would be a precipice over 
which I should fall. Pardon me for saying it, sir. 
I am sorely tempted to put myself right in a way 
that once upon a time I should never have dreamed 



TOWARDS JERUSALEM 47 

I could even entertain in thought. What am I to do?" 
At first I thought he had come, as so many do, to 
ask that I should put him right. I was thankful I 
did not say so; for in another moment he said, 
"Mind you, neither you nor any other man can 
save me; if ruin comes it will be on too big a scale 
for you or for anyone else to avert the catastrophe. 
What I want to know is this: Knowing as I do 
that my little ones are sleeping at home, and that 
this harassment is hanging over me, and that if I 
fail they suffer too, what am I to do?" I said, 
"Do you really need to ask a preacher?" His reply 
was, "I think not; but if I refuse to do what I am 
sorely tempted to do, what then? Ruin — failure." 
I said, "Perhaps so. Go back to your business, 
and fail; and when your life story comes to be told 
— and it may be a long while yet — praise God for 
the success. You have not done; it seems to you 
so simple to take the selfish wrong road, to go down 
because the hill is so steep to climb." "No," he 
said, "not that. What I am afraid of is, I am 
going down." I said, "If you go, underneath are 
the everlasting arms. A man falls into the hands 
of God — the safest place, be he sinner or be he 
saint. Go there." I have never heard from him 
what happened; I sometimes feel I would like to 
know. For I can parallel that story. I could show 
men who do not stand so high up in the world as 
they used to do; but they are thankful that con- 
science is clean. They know it was worth while to 



48 THE WINDOWS OPEN 

take the straight road; they know it was the wisest 
plan to do the right thing; they know it were 
better to bequeath to their children a father's noble 
character than to sin for the sake of temporary 
deliverance. They know that in the den of lions 
there was no evil, for the Lord of Hosts was there. 
The God of Heaven has His own way of delivering 
those that put their trust in Him. The Eternal 
God is our refuge, and underneath are the ever- 
lasting arms. Brother men, keep your hearts pure 
and sweet and clean. Keep your soul open towards 
God. Live your life with the windows open toward 
Jerusalem. Trust in God and do the right. 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 



This sermon was an attempt to reach some successful commercial 
men who were among the casual hearers at the City Temple. 
Worshippers they were not, for their estimate of Christian char- 
acter had, somehow, become sadly vitiated. A friend sent me a 
line saying a group of these commercial men were in London and 
would be at service on Sunday evening. The bow was drawn 
at a venture, and not in vain. 



IV 

"Then saith Pilate unto Him, Speakest Thou not unto me? 
knowest Thou not that I have power to crucify Thee, and have 
power to release Thee? Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no 
power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above: 
therefore he that delivered Me unto thee hath the greater sin." — 
St John xix. 10, n. 

There is a moral tragedy enacted here. There 
seems to have been a certain understanding between 
Jesus and the Roman Governor who condemned 
Him to death. We can see this by the demeanour 
of the governor in the presence of the prisoner. 
They changed places. Pilate seems to confess his 
inferiority by his very uneasiness and by the 
respect that breathes through all his utterances to 
Jesus. We have already pointed out one or two 
of these during the reading of our lesson. But 
here is another, a sort of impulsive, feverish, not 
very dignified remonstrance directed against Jesus 
because He keeps silence in the face of his accusers. 
Pilate wishes to show at his best in the presence 
of these chief priests and scribes who are watching 
him with jealous eye, ready to denounce him to his 
own imperial master if he does not do what they 
want. Jesus stands quietly but majestically in the 
midst, the King that Pilate had confessed Him to 
be, and answers never a word. Then petulantly 
the governor expostulates in the terms of our text, 



52 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

"Answerest Thou nothing? Speakest Thou not 
unto me? Knowest Thou not that I have power 
to crucify Thee and I have power to release Thee?" 
Then our Lord speaks. He knows that this poor 
puppet of the Roman Emperor, this plaything of 
the scheming priests, has no power at all. What 
is more, He knows that the governor is himself 
aware of it. He has a great opportunity, and he 
is flinging it aside. Nay, further, He dares to utter 
the hard saying that even they, like Pilate, must 
have derived their power for mischief from the 
fact that it was first a power for good, entrusted 
to them by the Lord of Glory Himself. "Thou 
couldest have no power at all against Me except 
it were given thee from above." 

But there was something Pilate could have done. 
He might have been, as I have elsewhere said, the 
first on the roll of the Christian martyrs. He had 
no power to save Jesus. If he had released Him 
at the moment it would only have been to take 
his place beside Him later. He had not moral 
courage to do what his heart prompted him to do, 
and he felt it was right to do, speak for Jesus, 
face His accusers, because he knew what the con- 
sequences would be. Had it been otherwise there 
would have been a fourth cross erected upon Calvary, 
nay, perhaps there would have been only two, no 
brigand being crucified beside Jesus, but only the 
Roman governor who tried to save Him, and died 
a martyr for his nobleness. 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 53 

Pilate felt that Jesus was not of earth, but of 
heaven. He knew He was a Son of God, though 
he could not have said just whence His authority 
was derived, but felt, as we all feel, the power, the 
grandeur, the majesty of His character. He knew 
that he was committing a foul crime in handing 
Him over to a cruel death. Far better if we had 
been able to speak of Pilate to-night as the first 
man in all history to suffer and die for Christ. He 
let the opportunity go. It availed him nothing, for 
if tradition is to be believed, his end was tragical 
after all. But the Christ knew at the moment what 
was at stake, and our text is an expostulation to the 
governor. In fact, it is the holding up of an ideal 
and an invitation to it. "Thou hast no power. He 
that delivered Me unto thee hath the greater sin." 
Thine is but the power which will bring destruction 
it may be upon thyself, the power of choosing the 
right with the certainty of suffering at the end. As 
for the priests, what for them? Jesus said nothing 
to them. They were more difficult to deal with 
than the governor, more vicious hypocrites by far. 
They would not enter into the judgment-hall for 
fear of being defiled, but they were doing a 
hateful and abominable thing when they sent Christ 
there to be destroyed. They were serving their 
own ends, giving vent to their own guilty passions, 
and in doing so they were taking upon their lips the 
name and authority of God. It was in the name of 
religion that they denounced Him to their own 



54 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

people. It was in the name of political principle 
that they denounced Him to the Roman governor. 
Knowing so, they put Him out of the way. You 
can feel that Pilate's failure, tragical as it was, was 
not half so tragical as the failure of those priests with 
the power that had been given unto them by God. 
Leaders and teachers of the people as they were, 
they well understood what Jesus meant when He 
said, "He that delivered Me unto thee hath the 
greater sin." For they deliberately employed the 
God-given power, knowing that they were doing it 
to destroy the God-sent messenger. They must 
have felt who Jesus was, but even if they did not 
they must have felt what Jesus was, and yet in the 
face of their knowledge they sent Him to death, 
and the power by which they sent Him was the 
power that they claimed to be divine. 

Power is always a dangerous gift. It may be 
used for high ends, or it may be employed to blast 
and to destroy high things. The late Mr Gladstone 
once said, nearly at the close of his life, that the 
tendency of power was always to demoralise its 
possessor. The nineteenth century, he asserted, 
had in this country been a century of political 
emancipation. The people, using the word in its 
general sense, were coming to their own. The 
power was now placed in their hands, and the 
question the great Christian statesman put to 
England was, How are the people going to use 
that power? for, judging by the lessons of history, 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 55 

it has nearly always been that the possession of 
power meant anything but a noble use thereof. In 
the French Revolution, for example, we see what 
power in popular hands was capable of doing. 
People began by coming to their own. Under the 
influence of the eloquence of a Mirabeau and a 
Rousseau, they claimed in the name of high ideals 
to dispossess the men who had sinned against the 
God-given trust. Then the guillotine was set up, 
and rivers of blood flowed in that devoted city, the 
capital of that fair land. When I was there a few 
days ago, and read, written upon the outside of 
nearly every public building, "Liberty, Equality, 
and Fraternity," I could not but remember that 
those words had been placed there in the time of 
tumult and lust for blood, all done by the power 
which the possessors were asserting was given by 
high destiny for high use. How did it end? We 
all know how it passed into the hands of vicious 
and villainous men. Perhaps they were not vicious 
or villainous before they received it. Few can bear 
to be the trustees of power. Power in the hands 
of religion has worked some of the most diabolical 
evils in history, not to speak of politics, and it is 
all the more dangerous because it can make a weapon 
of religious zeal. One of the saddest chapters in 
the history of mankind is the chapter of religious 
persecution. We who are accustomed to hear it 
now afar off can scarcely bear to tolerate the name 
of the system which used it for the worst, but there 



56 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

are few of us who can claim to be religious at all 
who have much right to speak in this regard. When 
the Congregationalism of which so many of us in 
this building to-night are so proud, and in which we 
have so great confidence, had the upper hand, it 
used the sword, and it used it badly, and in some 
cases used it wickedly. Is this spirit gone? Is the 
danger past that even religion cannot bear to be 
the possessor of power? It is not gone. The 
danger is not by any means past. By this door 
to-day enter hypocrisy, cant, religious lies, intoler- 
ance, bigotry, self-righteousness, a disposition to 
make another suffer for his opinions. And most 
detestable and hateful of all, it frequently happens 
that such pain is caused and such evil is done in 
the name of God. The fires of hell are lighted the 
moment a man gives rein to bad passions, and names 
God or even Christ as reason for his doing so. 
And God permits it, too. A great gift for useful- 
ness may become a curse, and often has done. Too 
often the gift is not buried, like the talent in the 
earth. It is put out to usury for the devil. Surely 
there must be a reckoning day for this, the worst 
of all sins, the deliberate misuse of the power that 
comes from God. 

So far, perhaps, most of us have felt fairly safe 
from inclusion in this indictment. Most of us feel 
that we have never had much power to misuse. It 
is my strong and increasing conviction that a good 
deal of the cant and hypocrisy around us nowadays 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 57 

is to be found amongst those who imagine them- 
selves to be freest from it. I need hardly instance 
in an audience of this kind, promiscuous as it is, 
what I feel to be the mistaken spirit of some evan- 
gelistic Christians of the present hour. We have 
read of, and we constantly hear of, the fierceness 
and the intolerance of the spirit of injured Noncon- 
formity. Granted the injury, I deplore with you the 
spirit in which the injury is too often met. There 
is a certain arrogance and self-righteousness about a 
good deal of- our reasoning and our protest of to-day 
that I would to God could be swept away by a 
nobler spirit. 

To-night, however, I am addressing men who are 
neither Churchmen nor Nonconformists. I am 
addressing some who can afford to be quizzical, 
because they are of the great crowd that looks on. 
I was asked this morning to speak a word to-night 
directly to commercial men, and I am informed that 
amongst my congregation there are many this 
evening who are not in the habit of giving in their 
adherence to any particular form of religious pro- 
fession. Now, it would be perfectly easy while I 
spoke the words in the former part of my sermon 
to-night for you to be saying to yourselves, It is 
quite true; we know how vicious, how vitriolic the 
religious spirit can be in the name of religious zeal 5 
how men can give vent to their worst natures in 
the name of the highest principle, but thank 
goodness we do not belong to that particular set. 



58 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

We are in the position of being able to say, "A 
plague on both your houses.'' Well, now, I 
would with all respect point out to you, address- 
ing you as a man to men, and not as one 
on any special pedestal of authority — point 
out to you that in this principle you are 
only entitled to repudiate a lower in the name 
of a higher. I often feel that the man of the 
world, who is rather proud than otherwise of the 
name, is by no means entitled to denounce excess 
of religious zeal or the unloveliness of the average 
religious character. There are not very many things 
so dangerous as the spirit of the cynic engaged in 
rebuking sin. And there is a good deal of it. There 
is a section of the secular Press, which, pretending 
to be superior to all creeds and denominations, look- 
ing down upon them all and smiling at them all, sets 
up an ideal which in spirit is anything but an im- 
provement on that they would condemn. Have you 
ever heard the cynic in private life pointing out 
another man's evil motive, and have you not felt 
that there was something poisonous about his very 
presence? The cynic is a danger in any society. 
The cynic is a special danger when he poses as the 
destroyer of false ideals. He has nothing but a 
worse to put in their place. 

Now, brethren, I put my question to you again. 
As you are only entitled to repudiate a lower in the 
name of a higher, I would ask you what are you 
doing with your life? You who have, as most of 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 59 

you have, a respect for the name of Jesus, but very- 
little respect for His so-called followers, what are 
you doing with God's gift of power as it has been 
afforded unto you? It is easy for you to imagine 
yourselves to be standing on the side of Christ, as it 
were, in that historic scene in Pilate's hall and to be 
speaking for the Master rather than to be taking 
your seat upon the judge's bench. Nay, it is only 
too possible that from the judge's bench you may 
pass to the ranks of Annas and Caiaphas and the 
crowd. And the man who refuses to have anything to 
do with religion because he can see nothing that is 
noble, no high incentive in the religious example of 
those about him, puts himself in the spirit of the 
priests who condemned Jesus because of the envy 
they felt for a higher than their own. If you can see 
nothing admirable in the life of the Christian Church, 
I would ask you what are you putting in its place? 
Have you a higher ideal of manhood and life and 
love and duty, and are you living to it? Because if 
you are, then, and not till then, are you entitled with 
authority to say, "A plague on this or that false ideal 
which assumes upon the lips of its professors the name 
of God." 

A little while ago we were visiting Switzerland. 
Some of our party began to ascend one day one 
of the highest peaks in that particular district where 
we were staying. You have all heard of the 
edelweiss, a plant that grows usually in almost 
inaccessible spots in these mountain regions. I 



60 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

noticed that some of the inhabitants of the district 
were selling the edelweiss in the valleys before we 
began to ascend the mountain at all, and, like the 
rest, I bought a bunch of it. When I reached home 
I found on one of my bookshelves a poem descriptive 
of the ideal, the strenuous ideal, of the man who 
gathers his edelweiss from the mountain top and the 
craggy steep and the inaccessible crevasse, higher, 
far higher than the common earth, high above our 
ordinary levels of daily life. I thought to myself, 
"I got my edelweiss easily. Someone else gathered 
it, I but carried it home." And as a general rule 
and all through history you will find there has been 
some hero gathering the edelweiss. It has been 
easy for other men to take it home afterwards. 
Some have laboured, some have suffered, we, their 
inheritors, have but entered into their labours. 
How seldom you meet the heroic temper anywhere. 
How seldom you meet the man who is prepared to 
lose for the advocacy of a principle. How seldom 
you meet a man who will shoulder responsibility and 
go bravely forward for an ideal though he be the 
only one to profess it, and how much more seldom 
you find a man who will do that in a Christlike spirit. 
Oh, it is difficult to be intense and at the same 
time to be tolerant. It is difficult to be in deadly 
earnest and at the same time to remain benevolent. 
Too often when we have scaled a certain height, 
and seen a certain vision and garnered a certain 
harvest, then we have begun to trifle with the ideal 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 61 

and confess it with our lips when the spirit of it has 
gone. It is as if we had handed Christ over to 
be crucified afresh and in so doing had given back 
the power granted to us. Nay, worse than that, 
misused it, employed it for other ends than God 
gave it to us at the first. 

You have your special dangers, my fellow men, 
business men, though you are a fine manly set of 
men — to take you as a whole. May I ask what your 
dangers are and ask you whether you can answer the 
question along with me? The first you will say is 
obviously the rush to make money. Nothing of the 
kind. It is thundered in the pulpit and in the 
religious press to-day as the greatest danger of our 
time, the rush to grab and to get. It is not, there 
is a danger anterior to that. It is the coarsening of 
our aspirations, it is the fading of idealism from our 
national life, and you commercial men are specially 
prone to it if you will permit me without offensive- 
ness to say so. All men become like their pursuits. 
A man's thoughts determine him. As he thinketh 
in his heart so is he. You can be very very selfish 
and apologise to yourself for that of which you 
know you are guilty by saying it is not possible to be 
anything else and yet be a successful business man. 
You have very little time, I know, to read, to think, 
to pray. You are a little inclined to be con- 
temptuous of these things and of a man in earnest 
too. If there is a type of character that you detest 
more than another it is that of the religious pro- 



62 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

fessor who is living no better life than you. Now, 
to be honest, I would ask you to look beneath your 
own profession and see if you are not sometimes 
guilty of that of which you accuse him. You have 
power. Up to a certain point you have used it well. 
You have a type of manhood to which you give the 
term of approval. But are you using your power 
for higher ends than those with which you began 
to gain it? It is God's trust to you. Are you using 
it as well to-day as when it was first given, or are 
you using it to crucify the Christ in yourself? You 
do this every time you deliberately act from a base 
or a sordid motive. Materialism on a petty scale is 
the bane of a good many of the men I am addressing 
to-night. You may be guilty of putting your own soul 
to death, and all the while have the spirit of self-satis- 
fied superiority about it. The religious man does 
not seem to be so very detestable and contemptible, 
after all, when you bring him into the presence of 
an ideal like yours, for what, after all, is the world 
better for the man who condemns the failure of 
another to live to a high ideal, which he himself 
never dreams of even trying to reach ? 

We will go a little closer to the subject. Here 
is another danger of the commercial man. You 
have, it is true, a sort of good-fellowship, a notion 
of a good comrade, but of what kind should we say 
a good fellow should be? It is not true that the 
religious talker sins against the social ideal, as you 
sometimes accuse him of doing, and yet I do not 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 63 

want you to be a religious talker. Is not this true, 
however, that very often our good-fellowship means 
that every man in a certain company is talking and 
is acting below his own habitual level? We seem 
ashamed of moral dignity. Let those who have 
never been guilty of falling below what they know 
to be their best selves when in the society of other 
men just pass this by, it does not concern them. But 
unless I am mistaken, I have heard in the presence 
of commercial men and professional men, too, and 
the ordinary man about town, I have heard conver- 
sation which I felt sure was below the level, the 
ordinary level, of every man in that company. I 
have seen young fellows whose character was being 
blighted, and blighted by the example of their elders 
and no man protested, and I have felt that in the 
presence of ideals which were the exact opposite of 
those in which you were trained from your childhood 
some of the men who knew better and were living 
better might have intervened to save a lad from 
corruption. Not the religious talker, again I say, 
is wanted. We want the man who is prepared to 
live up to the high moral standard that his conscience 
feels to be the best he has ever seen. The thing 
to be feared to-day is not wrong religious notions, 
it is moral flabbiness. The thing to be dreaded 
to-day is not vicious, petty religious intolerance, it 
is that men will let go the standard that conscience 
has set up. The danger to-day is that men cease to 
care about certain offences against righteousness; the 



64 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

danger is lest fineness of feeling be at a discount; 
the danger to such men as you is, I am afraid, that 
sometimes you neglect the higher duty in the pur- 
suit of the lower. Are you not guilty, then, of 
deliberate sin, not against religious creeds, but 
against what is written in letters of fire on every 
man's heart, the moral standard of Jesus Christ? 
George Eliot said, some time near to her death, 
that she started life with three ideals, three points 
of anchorage — God, immortality, and duty. She said 
the third was the only one that she held most certain 
at the end. God seemed to fade out of her life, 
belief in immortality went, too, but to duty she had 
clung to the last, and for her duty she was prepared 
to suffer and die. Robertson of Brighton, at the 
religious crisis of his life, as most of you know, 
spoke of his experience in similar terms. He was 
not quite sure what creed embodied the truth, if 
indeed any did at all, but of one thing he was 
perfectly certain, that the eternal laws of righteous- 
ness claimed his obedience, and he felt at the worst 
it was better to be pure than impure, better to be 
clean than unclean, better to strive honestly and 
earnestly after the highest he had seen than to let 
these things go, and speak as if they did not matter. 
Duty is a creed that will lead you into the fulness 
of truth. Follow the divine manhood at whatever 
cost. Keep your heart pure and your standard high. 
I know of the fierceness of the struggle in which 
so few of you succeed. I know how little you have 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 65 

to hope ever to become men of wealth and power as 
the world counts it. If there be one or two rich men 
here to-night there can hardly be more, probably all 
the rest of you who are busy in the ordinary business 
battle never expect to do more than secure a com- 
petence. What I would ask you to do is this, Never 
be crushed underneath material burdens, no matter 
what they may be. Keep your soul clean and your 
vision clear. And it is possible, nay, it is more than 
possible, it is certain, God has given you the power 
of doing it, and for that power you are responsible 
to Him. 

Take that lad, now, who will be with you to- 
night when you get back to your hotel, and in 
your commercial room will be listening to his elders, 
to the ideals that you have set before him as being 
proper and ordinary for business men. This lad 
has just come from a country home. He knows 
very little of the great world. He talks as if he 
did. He will try to conceal his ignorance from you 
for fear of being laughed at, and presently perhaps 
he may be laughed at because he has some of the 
associations, some of the vestiges, some of the in- 
fluences of a religious home still clinging about him. 
You find him out. Do you make it easier for that 
lad to live the right life, the good life, the straight 
and pure life, or do you make it harder by the 
atmosphere into which he has come? Come, now, 
business men, face this fact together. Some day 
you hear that he has gone wrong — somebody is 



66 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

going wrong every day from such concerns as yours 
and such ordinary walks of life, as you know best. 
This lad goes wrong — drink or women, or both. 
Then you have to ask the question, What sent 
him wrong? and when you meet him in your 
little society, to take up the old-time conversation 
and to advocate the old-time ideals, and to make 
the old-time denunciations of other people whom 
you accuse of being canting hypocrites, you have 
to account for that young man's ruin. You say 
his vices destroyed him. True they did, but 
something destroyed him before the vices gripped 
him, and that was the atmosphere, the moral atmos- 
phere, of the business house into which he was 
introduced. Remember this, the vices were but 
as Pilate on the bench. They had power, to be 
sure they had, and he could have defied them if 
he liked. God had given him power greater than 
they, but the vices were only the Pilate, and you 
may have been the Caiaphas. What ideal did 
you set before him? He was weaker than 
you; you could go to the very verge of ruin and 
turn back. It was not the wine, it was not 
the women, it was his associates that destroyed 
his life, as they are being destroyed in hundreds 
and thousands throughout this great land of 
England to-day, and it is no cant and hypocrisy 
I am talking now. Manhood and only manhood 
can save him. If there is one thing more than 
another that we need in England to-day, it is 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 67 

tolerant, open-hearted manhood, manhood beneath 
which the weak can shelter. Manhood is a trust 
from God. Manhood is a God-given power, and 
for our manhood we must give account at last when 
we stand before the great white throne. 

Let me tell you a case now in point where manhood 
has come to the rescue. I have a friend in Edinburgh, 
a well-known preacher, getting on in years. I will 
not name him, but if you choose to guess his name 
I shall not be offended. It happened on one 
occasion the following incident came under his 
notice, indeed, formed part of his experience. A 
commercial man was in the habit of going to listen. 
One Sunday it struck him that the preacher was 
discouraged about something, did not seem to be 
himself, failed in giving his message with his usual 
power. So he thought, after having heard him for 
so many years he was entitled to turn comforter 
himself. He made his way to the preacher on the 
Monday morning to tell him this. First about 
himself. "Years ago," he said, "under the in- 
spiration of your ministry I made up my mind to do 
two things. First, I would buy a new book every 
week and I would read it to keep my soul from 
being fossilised by the things with which I have to 
deal day by day, to keep before me the divine ideal. 
But, secondly, I made up my mind that I should not 
be merely passive amongst the men with whom I 
have to deal, but if I could bring any man to the 
better life by my example, by my invitation, it 



68 THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 

should be done. I have never posed as being a 
man of prominently worthy religious character, but 
now and then I have asked a friend to step with me 
here and listen to you. I thought I would come 
this morning and tell you that last night you gripped 
a man's conscience and changed a man's life, and I 
think God must be glad." "Well," replied my 
friend, "you have told me that, now I have some- 
thing to tell you." And he opened a drawer and 
showed this man of commerce a dozen or twenty 
letters received from commercial men who had been 
brought to that place of worship by him, and who 
said it was not merely on his invitation that they 
came, but on his life. They felt his goodness, 
his unselfishness, his worth, his Christlike char- 
acter, although he seldom talked lip-language about 
Christ. Here was an ideal, practically it is the only 
ideal that I care to commend to you. 

I care very little, business men, whether you 
believe in my doctrine or no, I care a great deal 
whether you believe in the moral standard I have 
set before you or no. The one thing that matters 
is right living and the only thing about which you 
and I will be asked in the great day will be how we 
have used our life. Because we are not alone, we 
do not stand or fall to ourselves and ourselves only. 
All around us there are lives that touch ours. An 
atmosphere has to be created, created by manhood 
at its best, and you can live the Christ life with the 
simplest faith in Him without making any very loud 



THE MISUSE OF DIVINE POWER 69 

profession of doctrine at all. And yet I tell you 
that to-day, just as much as in that old-time day of 
which we have been reading to-night, the trial is 
going forward in the judgment-hall and we are 
either standing with Christ upon the floor or sitting 
with Pilate upon the bench, or we are with the 
gibbering, hateful priests outside. In which 
company of the three are you and I to be found? 
I would like to be with that commercial man in the 
great day of reckoning and revelation, for when he 
and the Master meet face to face Jesus will say, 
"Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord." Will He say it, does 
He say it, can He say it to you and to me? He hath 
granted us a great trust. Not a man of us can 
repudiate the knowledge of it. We are placed 
where we are for no trifling reason, but that we 
may witness for God and right and truth. Are we 
doing it, or are we already judged and condemned? 



A FORFEITED GIFT 



This sermon was preached to a backslider. 1 have sorrowfully to 
confess that it was preached in vain. 



" He wist not that the Lord had departed from him." — Judges xvi. 20. 

Every country has its particular accumulation of 
legend and tradition and folk-lore. Our own, for 
instance, has its Song of Beowulf; its legend 
concerning a character who is certainly historic, 
though we know very little about him — King 
Alfred ; and the stories in which children delight 
and which the adults have not forgotten concerning 
the famous outlaw Robin Hood. Switzerland has 
its William Tell, though how much that is told 
about him to the modern tourist is the truth, who 
shall say? In Germany it is Friedrich Barbarossa, 
Norway has its King Olaf ; Denmark its hero who 
lies asleep until the hour of Denmark's greatest 
peril, and then he is to awake and save it. Pro- 
bably all the beautiful and interesting stories that 
have gathered around characters like these have had 
their origin in some fact. Some outstanding man 
has impressed himself upon the imagination of his 
time by the grandeur of his achievements, and his 
memory has not been allowed to die. 

The story which has been written around our 
text is just one of these. It belongs to the half- 
historic legend and folk-lore of Israel I do not 



74 A FORFEITED GIFT 

regard it as literal history, but there is a truth to 
be disentangled — disengaged is a better word — 
from its setting. The modern mind would, almost 
without investigation, repudiate the thaumaturgical 
element here. That any man was ever endowed 
with miraculous power because he was a Nazarite, 
unshaven from birth, seems to be out of character 
— certainly it was out of harmony — with the facts 
of ordinary everyday experience. But cannot the 
plain, stolid, Anglo-Saxon intellect see beneath the 
imagery here and take away the dress in which this 
hero of old time is presented to us ? Here is a man 
with a gift — that is one prime fact — raised up for a 
great work, and he must have been faithful to it 
up to a point, or Israel would not have remembered 
him. But he became false to it, by arrogant self- 
indulgence. And the worst of it was he is not the 
only one in history of whom it may be said that the 
gift departed from him, that his vocation was forfeited 
and at the end he himself was ignorant of the 
fact. 

All of you can see therefore in my text a world of 
meaning, always true to human experience as you 
and I know it whether we retain or whether we 
dismiss the particular setting of this life-story. 

Before passing on I would remind, at any rate, the 
younger members of my congregation, that the Bible 
and particularly the Old Testament is always to be 
read in the light of Christ. Three-quarters of the 
questions you ask concerning its difficulties would 



A FORFEITED GIFT 75 

disappear if you would just remember that simple 
principle. Whether it be its miracles or its moral 
standard, you must think of the Bible and what it 
has to tell in the terms of the Christ and what we 
know of Him. 

Now we cannot approach even this story without 
taking with us something that we have learned from 
Calvary, and when with our knowledge of Jesus we 
come to investigate the life-story of Samson, the 
lesson is not far to seek. Painters and poets have 
made it their theme, because of the tragedy with 
which this great life closed, and I suppose most of 
you here present are familiar with the great poem of 
one of the greatest of our national prophets, upon this 
theme, the fall, the failure, and the death of one 
who might have been a mighty power for good in 
the history of the world. 

Up to a point, as I have said, he was. Beyond 
that point he failed, and did not see that he was 
serving himself instead of his Maker. He fell. 
The fall and the death of Samson are illustrative of 
a recurrent human experience. Unfaithfulness to a 
divine gift results in its withdrawal. In a sense all 
men are divinely gifted, though their gifts differ 
both in quality and in degree, which is precisely 
what we ought to expect. No man in this congre- 
gation to-night is precisely in characteristics, personal 
history, and destiny, what anyone else is or ever has 
been. You are each of you unique in the history of 
mankind. There is a divine inbreathing in every 



j6 A FORFEITED GIFT 

soul that comes to moral consciousness in this world. 
Some characters stand out from their fellows, but 
perhaps their prominence is more apparent than real. 
Who knows what the perspective of heaven would 
show concerning the comparative worth of the men 
and women who are gathered before me in this 
house to-night, and whose very names I do not 
know? In history, however, and particularly in 
Bible history, we are well acquainted with examples 
of the principle I have just been trying to place 
before you. Suppose Samson had lived and died 
like the great lawgiver of Israel — who can think 
about Moses without believing his estimate of man- 
hood is better for that life ? Joshua, who, inspired 
by a greater than himself, hearing his divine call, 
"Moses my servant is dead, now therefore arise," 
rose captain of Israel, faithful to the call, was faith- 
ful to the last, in his dying hour, calling Israel before 
him, " Choose you this day whom ye will serve." 
Elijah, the most picturesque of them all, a solitary 
figure in a decadent age, defying all the untoward 
tendencies of his time, witnessing for God and in the 
sublimity of his death impressing Israel for good, 
like Samson, but oh, in what a different fashion ! 
Elijah wrought more by his death than he had 
wrought by his life, a purification of morals and 
manners that his testimony had never managed to 
accomplish. The removal of Elijah from the earthly 
scene shamed and impelled Israel to reform. 

Suppose that Samson's life and death had been as 



A FORFEITED GIFT 



11 



these — for he was called to the first place just as 
these were ? He had his opportunity and he put it 
away. " He wist not that the Lord had departed 
from him." Vocation may be forfeited, and there 
is no tragedy so sad, no end so melancholy, as that 
in which a man discovers that he has been living for 
long without God and without the gift that might 
have led him to great things. As in the sacred, so 
in the so-called secular history of the world — is 
there any secular history ? I venture to believe 
that there is not. We take our stand by the side 
of Socrates, who never heard of Israel's God, but 
lived and died in witness of the highest that he had 
ever seen, and even Moses did not die a nobler death 
than he; taking, as he said, a leap in the dark, 
but he was faithful to what he knew to be 
the divine charisma granted to him. St Bernard, 
in what we are now accustomed to call the dark 
ages, a simple monk, rejects all the honours of 
the world, and when no one else dares the task, 
stands before the crowned monarch who had been 
unfaithful in one of the most sacred ties which 
God has ever ordained to bind heart with heart and 
soul with soul. This king, because he was a king, 
would have entered the sanctuary, but was forbidden 
and repelled by the stern monk who shook Europe 
and the world. There was a divine gift upon 
St Bernard, and we feel, we see, we know the 
grandeur of the man. He was called, and he 
was not unfaithful to the call. 



78 A FORFEITED GIFT 

Compare these with characters whose testing, in 
some ways as great, ended in a sadness that makes 
us for pity bow the head. Cranmer, standing at 
the stake to die for his faith — how much more 
nobly he might have died if he had not had to hold 
in the flame the unworthy hand that signed his re- 
cantation. And Wolsey, as Mr Hughes was telling 
us a few nights ago, rising to the first place in the 
kingdom, and then forfeiting it, not because he was 
capable of the fearless testimony of a Bernard, not 
because he showed the courage of an Elijah upon 
Carmel, but because he halted between two opinions, 
not knowing which way the balance of royal favour 
might incline. Hear his dying words, " O, Cromwell, 
Cromwell, had I served my God as I have served my 
king, He would not have given me over in my 
grey hairs." Both Cranmer and Wolsey named 
the name of God to the last, claimed Him as upon 
their side, spoke as it were in the language of the 
Christ, knowing not, never reflecting that the spirit 
of the Lord had departed from them. Oh, history 
is full, it teems with instances in which men put off 
the day of reckoning, deceiving themselves, forfeit- 
ing the gift divine, trampling upon their own oppor- 
tunities. They wist not that the day of the Lord 
was at hand and that the Spirit of the Lord had 
departed from them. 

At first sight it might seem as though these con- 
siderations had little value for such an audience as I 
have present before me to-night. But such is far 



A FORFEITED GIFT 79 

from being the case. God's gift is bestowed upon 
every man in his degree and for his particular work. 
You have had your gracious opportunity, your season 
of vision, and whatever kind of man you are it will 
be of no use in the great day of reckoning for you 
to deny the moment when the charisma came. There 
is a judgment of surprises, it is true. "Lord, when 
saw we Thee sick or in prison or in necessity and 
did not minister unto Thee ? " And the answer 
may come — " Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of 
the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto 
Me." 

Do we know the opportunity when it comes ? 
Can we recognise the voice eternal ? Are we clear as 
to the moment when we stop our ears and close our 
eyes and turn our feet from the pathway of duty ? 
Men mourn the consequences of sin more than they 
mourn the sin. We hear men lamenting that they 
did not see more clearly that the wages of sin was 
agony and shame. " Oh," they say, "how strangely 
is this moral universe ordered. We are not told 
about the other side of the wrong-doing." Every 
man buys his experience for himself, and when he 
finds it hard murmurs in surprise, he did not know. 
One thing you all know. You know that wrong 
is wrong. You know with what motive you do the 
evil service. You know for what object you leave 
a duty undone, you know when you juggle with 
the things that are necessary to true living, you 
know when you try to compromise with the ideals 



80 A FORFEITED GIFT 

that were given to you. You know perfectly well 
if this gift that is in you is debased, and when you 
know it you have rightly judged in the day of dread 
discovery that the Spirit of .the Lord has departed. 

Now let me examine at closer quarters what I 
have been trying to set before you thus plainly. It 
is sometimes said that the word of the prophet 
has no hearing in these days. Men are indifferent 
to the claims of the Christ. God has but little 
place in their lives. To a certain extent that is 
perfectly true. There are many men in this church 
to-night who hardly know why they are here — some 
it may be out of idle curiosity, some prepared to 
scoff at what they see and hear, some to whom the 
practices of devotion have no reality and no mean- 
ing, there is nothing in their lives upon which these 
things can take hold. Now, these are the very men 
to whom I have something to say. I do not begin 
protesting about my creed and urge you without 
argument and without sympathy and without ex- 
planation to accept mine. No, no, I have another 
way. I want to read yours, and ask you whether 
any man needs to argue about any justification of 
the creed that is written in letters of fire within 
your own soul. 

Now, my friends, is it true of the men before 
me who reject God and Christ and the Bible, and 
with it all the ideals and associations that belong of 
right thereto — is it true that they are living the life 
of the highest they can see ? Is it true of you that 



A FORFEITED GIFT 81 

you are living to the holiest you have seen? 
When you exchanged something else for Christ 
did you choose a higher or did you choose a lower ? 
If you chose a lower, putting from you the higher, 
on whatever hypocritical pretext your choice was 
made, you did it knowingly, and you forfeited a 
great opportunity, and you thrust from you the divine 
gift. You were nearer God as a child than you are 
now, and therefore nearer truth and beauty and 
light and love. You saw further into the meaning 
of things as they are than you see to-day with all 
your worldly wisdom. It is so easy for a man to go 
wrong while naming the name of right, and talking 
as though life were still conformed to an ideal, when 
the back is turned upon the light all the same. 
"He wist not that the Lord had departed from 
him." 

I will describe, if you will permit me for two 
minutes, the life of some of the men in this place 
who have never gone flagrantly wrong in all their 
days, who have been perfectly satisfied with them- 
selves up to this moment. Is this true? Re- 
member, I am choosing not the man who is 
deliberately wicked, I am speaking to a weaker 
being than he, for most of you are not particularly 
strong even in the world's way. Here is one typical 
London character, a man who is living for himself. 
He never acknowledges it to himself; not that he 
is absorbed in the pursuit of gain, because he is not 
particularly absorbed in the pursuit of anything. 



82 A FORFEITED GIFT 

He does not know the meaning of the word 
" sacrifice." So soon as a thing becomes difficult 
it is not for him. He cares nothing for that which 
brings to him no immediate and material return. 
He has no outlook beyond the immediate present. 
His aim is to get as much as possible out of life at 
as little as possible personal cost. How to amuse 
himself is the ideal of part of the young manhood 
of to-day, at any rate. Such a character pours 
ridicule upon the people who are in earnest, in 
earnest about anything. It seems to him infinitely 
absurd that people should preach or pray or labour 
for something greater than their own self-interest. 
He is superior to these things. How ridiculous 
looks the man who spends his time in advocating 
this cause or that cause. You are apt to ask, in 
your disbelief in unselfish motives, what is really at 
the bottom of the seemingly heroic acts of men who 
have, so far as you can see, nothing to gain by what 
they do. Poor fool that you are, dreaming that 
all is well when all is wrong, you are a meanly tragic 
failure. You do not even know that the failure is 
here already, sunning yourself in your own self- 
satisfaction, but knowing not that the glory of a 
day that once was yours has left you long ago. 
Some of you are sleeping the sleep of death in the 
lap of the harlot, but there will be a dread awaken- 
ing by-and-by. It may be upon this side of the 
grave, it may be upon the other, but " God is not 
mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 



A FORFEITED GIFT 83 

also reap." It is perfectly true that you are able to 
silence the voice of conscience, perfectly true that 
you can banish your scruples one by one ; perfectly 
true, and you know it, that manhood can deterio- 
rate and a man respect himself less and less as the 
years go on. And yet it may never be acknow- 
ledged even to one's own heart, let alone to the 
world that waits and watches without. "He wist 
not that the Lord had departed from him." 

Now, brethren, let us get close to the facts. You 
and I must do it some day, we may as well do it 
now. It is true that some amongst us are prostitut- 
ing God's gifts to base ends ? Who has ever been 
any better because you live ? What have you added 
to the world's good ? What do you purpose to do 
to-morrow with the manhood that God has granted 
to you? Does that question matter, or does it 
matter not ? Oh, men of the twentieth century, 
and of England and of London, you have your place 
to fill and God has sent you to fill it. You have your 
work to do and only you can do it, and your oppor- 
tunity is coming and you have known it and you 
know it now. God's gift rests upon you and you may 
be in danger of being false to it. Shall it be a dirge 
that is chanted over your life? Quite recently 
when we were in the Eternal City I paid a visit to 
that famous picture which everybody knows, in the 
Sistine Chapel, Michael Angelo's " Last Judgment." 
As we sat before the masterpiece in silence, as 
becomes him who would look upon such a work, 



84 A FORFEITED GIFT 

wrought in an age of wonders and dreams, I thought 
to myself that the Christ upon the throne there, the 
throne of judgment, is not my Christ — this Christ 
with a clean-shaven face, with an expression of in- 
placability, hurling down to destruction the poor, 
wretched beings who had no longer opportunity 
for protest. That is not my Christ, but is more 
like the conqueror in a Roman triumph, more like 
Achilles in his chariot dragging Hector, vanquished, 
round the walls of Troy. But behind the idea of 
the stern painter I did see a truth, as many have 
seen it before him, and that you and I must face too. 
There is a Christ who will judge. Before that 
Christ we must all appear. If you could see— but 
you know it not — you are standing before Him now, 
and there is not a man among you, strong as you 
are and worldly - wise, who could face without 
tremor, agitation, or shame, if your life is conformed 
to the baser ideals, that Christ of glory Who once 
was crucified for you. And the reason why I think 
you would dread the Christ Who is Judge is just 
because He was the Christ of crucified purity and 
love. 

Shall I tell you, if only in symbol, what I mean ? 
Once a lad came to me, a young fellow just as some 
of you are, and asked me to help him in a difficulty, 
the very circumstances of which I have forgotten. 
I knew who he was, so I said, " Why did you not 
go to your father? He is a good man, upright, 
loving, true." "I could not face him," was the 



A FORFEITED GIFT 85 

answer. " I should just as soon expect the sun to 
fall from heaven as my father to compromise with 
what he knew to be right, either for himself or for 
me. I should have to pay to the uttermost farthing." 
And yet that father was not a hard man. The sinner 
feared the face of the man, a good man, inflexibly 
righteous. In all compassion that is worthy of the 
name there is a mingling of austerity. Who would 
dream of compromising with the ideal when we stand 
in the very presence of the Christ ? Then you 
should not compromise with it now. " Awake, 
thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and 
Christ shall give thee light." 

There is no good in preaching except that there 
be a to-morrow. No preacher has the function of 
the herald of death. We are the heralds of life. 
When the last word comes to be spoken it will not 
be the prophet who speaks, it will be the Judge. 
It is the prophet who speaks now. The living 
Christ is calling to those who have ears to hear. 
His claim men can well admit, because He is the 
Highest. When I can find anything higher than 
Christ, then that becomes my creed forthwith. To 
Him we turn our eyes, the Giver of the ideal, and 
more than that, of the power to conform thereto. 

" Whoso hath felt the spirit of the highest 

Cannot confound nor doubt Him, nor deny ; 
Yea, with one voice, O World, though thou deniest, 
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I." 

Brother men, I am not calling you to anything an- 



86 A FORFEITED GIFT 

reasonable or impossible. Recognise that the divine 
gift rests upon you for just what you are and where 
you are, and that it can be withdrawn, and it may 
be. You are not living to your highest, and yet 
you could in the strength of the Lord God. Have 
you wandered away from it, turned your face from 
the light? Come back. The Master of us all is 
waiting to receive. 

" Come, lest this heart should, cold and cast away, 
Die ere the Guest adored she entertain, 
Lest eyes which never saw Thine early day 
Should miss Thy heavenly reign. " 

May the great God, to Whom all hearts are 
open, receive and reconsecrate every life in our 
midst unto His great service and to the glory of 
His great name. 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 



The central experience of the sermon which bears this title is 
a piece of real life given in the illustration of the elderly man 
whose greatest trouble came in the evening of his life. He was 
a brave man, unselfish and good, so I spoke to him from the 
pulpit, and finished the sermon, so far as he was concerned, in 
the vestry. 



VI 



" As . . . the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the 
brim of the water . . . the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of 
the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst . . . until all the people 
were passed clean over Jordan." — Joshua iii. 15, 17. 

We have a very striking historical incident herein 
referred to. I do not pretend to explain it as it 
stands in terms that would satisfy every critical 
mind ; but, whatever the literal facts may have 
been, our text enshrines a spiritual truth to which 
the story here narrated lends vividness and power. 
I am not at all disposed to believe that this story 
is incredible ; but it may well have been that, as 
handed down in the history of Israel, the facts 
recounted may not have been precisely as they took 
place. We have to read, as we would the narrative 
of a poet, a little between the lines, and fill in the 
details for ourselves. It must have been an incident 
that took very firm hold of the imagination of Israel, 
for it is told here with such vividness and power 
that apparently it had become a part of their folk- 
lore. It was told by the parents to the children, 
and monuments were erected to commemorate the 
passing of Israel over Jordan. What do you think 
actually took place ? I have supposed it to be 
something like this : — Joshua, the great captain, a 



9 o THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

man of unusual force and genius, led this wandering 
people, who, after forty years' hardening in the 
wilderness, were now become a formidable host, 
to the very borders of the promised land. Then 
they find that the way is barred, not only by the 
enemy, but by the river, which had overflowed its 
banks. Jordan, famous in history and song, they 
now behold for the first time. It is like a lake with 
a torrent tearing through the midst of it. It is no 
wonder that Israel called a halt upon the borders 
of this, as it were, unknown sea. But the great 
captain finds a way through. The very fact that 
Jordan has overflowed its banks means to him that 
it is fordable somewhere. He finds the place; the 
enthusiasm, courage, and devotion of the people 
would supply the rest. The great captain waits 
upon his God, and then turns to his people : " Here 
is the way through the flood; march on; let the 
priests that bear the ark of the Lord go through 
the waters and stand still on any rock that will 
supply them with a footing ; and where they stand 
do you pass." And it was even as he said. As 
the priests that bare the ark came to the brim of 
the waters the host rose and followed, nothing 
daunted by the seeming obstacle, or by the turbid 
billows, or the apparent blackness and depth of 
Jordan. And when they that bare the ark stood 
in the midst, their feet upon any rock that would 
afford them footing, some swimming, some walking, 
some carrying burdens, some with little children 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 91 

upon their shoulders, some leading others with their 
hands, the great host poured through — there was 
a way over Jordan. 

Here is a figure of at least one experience of the 
man of faith — the experience that the simple trust 
which refuses to call halt when the Divine com- 
mand is to go forward is never put to shame. God 
was the real Leader of Israel; the enthusiasm and 
self-devotion of the great captain, who laid his spell 
upon the mighty host, were derived from heaven. 
This was the way that God had marked out for 
Israel. The way lay through the flood, and that 
way Israel took at the bidding of its Leader. 

There may be one point of view from which this 
interpretation of the text may appear to be false — 
namely, the point of view which regards it as having 
reference to the circumstances rather than to the 
growth of the soul. I am taking a spiritual view of 
my text, keeping in mind the vividness of the his- 
torical incident. But now I would wish you to strip 
off everything that is merely external and adven- 
titious, local and temporary, and regard it as for all 
time, and as having an individual application. Fix 
your mind upon the principle rather than upon the 
particular scene. Oftentimes in history a similar 
feat has been attempted, with the same high en- 
thusiasm, and has utterly failed. I think, for in- 
stance, of the Crusades, when all Europe gathered 
under the banner of the Cress, marched upon Jordan, 
essayed to cross this very river, and to attack this very 



92 THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

capital of Jerusalem. Europe failed where Israel suc- 
ceeded. Europe set out to obtain possession of the 
tomb of the Saviour ; popes blessed the banners; kings 
and princes enlisted under them ; millions of lives 
were sacrificed, and rivers of blood were set flowing. 
But the tomb remains to-day, as it was then, in the 
possession of the Mohammedans. What Israel did 
on this historic day Europe at a later day failed to 
do. Why? Because the body of Christ was not 
there ; it was an empty tomb they were looking for, 
and for the moment found, and from an empty tomb 
they were hurled back. God had not bidden them 
set out upon that quest. The difference between 
Israel's conquest and the defeat of the Crusaders lies 
in this : that, though in both cases the enthusiasm 
was equal, though the Cross was blessed as much as 
the ark of God had ever been, the Crusaders called 
upon God to bless what they set out to do, whereas 
God called upon Israel to go forward, and Israel 
obeyed. 

Take another instance in history that comes 
nearer to our own time. It has been said that more 
mischief has been caused in the world by men who 
have conscientiously believed themselves to be led by 
God than by all other causes put together. This 
may or may not be true, but it has something on the 
face of it to justify the assertion being made. Take 
for instance the seventeenth century in this beloved 
land of ours, just before the outbreak of the great 
civil war. There had been eleven years of personal 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 93 

government when the Stuart King asserted his right 
divine to govern without help from constitutional 
authority. I believe Charles I. was firmly con- 
vinced that he derived his commission and authority 
from on high — but at the cost of his life. That was 
a small thing : he might have been a martyr to a 
great idea, but that for which he stood died with 
him and never rose again. Still more tragic, perhaps, 
is the fate of one of his ministers. I never can read 
the life and words of Archbishop Laud without feel- 
ing for him a certain sympathy and even admiration. 
He was a good man, according to his light. He set 
out, however, to do that which Englishmen and 
Scotsmen will never endure — to enforce an external 
uniformity of religious observance. He set out to 
coerce the conscience, and he failed. He tried with 
pains and penalties, with cruelty and injustice, to 
enforce what he conscientiously believed to be the 
best thing for the Church of God in his country. 
" Unity," said he, " cannot much longer subsist in a 
church when uniformity is thrust out of the door." 
Most pathetic are the entries in his diary as he lies 
in prison awaiting the end. He had set an ideal 
before him, and called upon God for its accomplish- 
ment, and was surprised when it was shattered into 
ruin, wondered in bewilderment that he had been 
abandoned at the crossing of Jordan. It was because 
he had never been set to go that way. He tried the 
flood at its deep : the great captain of Israel tried it, 
indeed, where it had overflowed its banks, but he 



94 THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

knew that God had made a ford there. Where 
Laud failed many another has failed, not only in the 
Established Church, but in that for which you and I 
stand. There was a day in that very century when 
Puritan and Covenanter strove against one another ; 
Greek met Greek that day at Dunbar. For once in 
his life Cromwell met his match in David Leslie, and 
if they two had been left alone to fight it out it is a 
grave question whether the Lord Protector would 
have returned victor to England. But the Presby- 
terian ministers interfered, quoting this very chapter, 
and perhaps my text itself. They, in counsel 
assembled, compelled their general to move his hosts 
down the hill. They said, " It is the sword of the 
Lord you hold in your hands ; fall on and destroy 
the Puritan army." So Leslie, sorely against his 
will, moved to the attack. As Cromwell saw him 
coming, he shut his Bible, mounted his horse, and, 
rallying his army, said, "Let God arise, and let His 
enemies be scattered ! " God could not be on both 
sides ; so the Presbyterian ministers who were so 
sure of their cause were scattered in flight ere many 
hours were gone. We love and respect them to-day 
for all they did and suffered in that strenuous time, 
but we may learn the lesson their history teaches — 
that it is not always the side that calls upon God 
that is sure of being able to pass the flood and stand 
victor on the other side. 

Now let us come home a little more closely with 
our illustrations. It has been said that one of our 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 95 

national vices, and the one about which we are most 
sensitive, is self-righteousness. If self-righteousness 
is conspicuous in one person more than another, it 
is in the middle-class Briton, church-goer and non- 
church-goer. We are familiar with the type — the 
man who is perfectly certain that he is right, though 
all the world be wrong ; but he has not been 
so perfectly sure as the saint and martyr who in 
dying has conquered. A man may be cross-grained, 
selfish, domineering, ambitious, covetous, and cruel ; 
and yet he may whitewash all this with religion, 
and, using the name of God, think that obstacles 
will melt before him, that he will march through 
the flood. When we have to do with these people 
at close quarters — in fact, when we have been 
included in their ranks ourselves — how surprised 
we have been when the flood, instead of going away, 
has overwhelmed them and us ! As a minister of 
religion, it has fallen to my lot sometimes to try 
to compose differences in other churches than my 
own. More than once, in undertaking such a 
difficult task, I have ere long found it impossible 
to succeed — not because one could not see what 
the matter was, but because one could not make 
the parties who were causing the trouble see just 
what it was. I have seen a man stand and sing 
with the air of a martyr at the stake, with almost 
the look of one, and yet he was the seed and the 
root of all the mischief — his spirit completely wrong. 
Standing for God, he said, and on principle — which 



96 THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

meant, as a rule, his own cross-grained will — and 
he meant to have it, and to have it all. He had 
come to his Jordan ; Jordan would not give way. 
He called upon the Lord, and he raised the ark, 
as he thought ; but he was the god enshrined in 
that ark, in spite of the name inscribed on his 
banners. To add that of Jehovah made no differ- 
ence: Jordan was there, there Jordan remained; 
there was no passage for him. 

Some of us know the man of business who 
justifies some exceedingly shady doing by the 
utterance of some such pious expression as this: 
"In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall 
direct thy paths." He has a keen sense of justice, 
perhaps, but he has very little sense of mercy. The 
man may be hard, covetous, grasping ; he can shut 
his ears and eyes to a thousand things, so clear 
in his vision of the way of true business dealing. 
He will tell you, " No man ever heard me break 
my word ; no man ever heard me make a promise 
that I did not keep. That which has given me my 
success is what I require from others; I stand 
upon simple justice and righteousness," and so on. 
He is not always quite sure of the foundation of 
the righteousness upon which he says he takes 
his stand. Righteousness is incomplete except its 
highest and final expression be love. "If any 
man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of 
His." Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, 
Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; but 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 97 

he that doeth the will of my Father which is in 
heaven." 

I speak in pity and in sympathy to any such man 
as I have described. Do you know why the 
Crusaders failed, failed at Jordan ? Do you know 
why Charles and Laud failed, failed when they 
crossed the Tweed? Do you know why you are 
failing? It is because you have called your own 
way God's way ; because, deep down at the bottom 
of all your motives, is worship of self; because you 
have not seen with the larger vision what it is 
that lies at the end of your march. Otherwise 
you would not be so keen upon the things that now 
are, for the fashion of this world passeth away. 
It is not sufficient to go through life calling upon 
the name of the Lord ; we have to be sure that we 
have heard the voice of the Highest saying, This is 
the way. The reason why men of great talent who 
have stood for God, as they thought, have failed is 
this : They have confounded God with the second 
best, not the best. You only find God upon the 
highest. If we have heard that voice Divine, it 
matters not that the way lies through the desert 
and the flood ; that is the way of victory and peace. 
We have to define and make clear both our motives 
and our aims. The highest and noblest we can 
ever hear is the voice of God. We cannot take the 
right way if we have chosen it in a wrong spirit. 
Popes may bless banners, kings may claim Divine 
right, business men and church members may utter 



9 8 THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

the name of God as the justification of their own 
way, but Jordan cannot be passed until self has been 
surrendered. Any man can know when he has the 
mind of Christ. Such a man is led by the Spirit of 
God. He bears the ark of God upon his shoulders, 
and the waters give way before him ; and not only 
for himself: others pass by, as it were under his 
shadow. We may be like the priests in the middle 
of the stream, standing on the rock and holding the 
ark high up. To see us so standing is a help to 
many a man to plunge into the stream and cross by 
himself. 

" On Jordan's stormy banks I stand, 
And cast a wistful eye 
To Canaan's fair and happy land, 
Where my possessions lie." 

"On Jordan's stormy banks" the waters will give 
way for you : you can march to the other side in 
perfect safety. So that you have given yourself to 
your Captain and the great High Priest it is easy 
for you to take the way that God has marked ; 
things are bound to go wrong if you take the way 
upon which God is not. 

Suppose we try to put all this to ourselves, right 
now, as the Americans say. What are you and I 
living for ? Are we fitted to carry the ark of God 
upon our shoulders? These old Covenanters that 
were defeated at Dunbar drew up a Catechism, 
which I used to learn in my early days. Perhaps 
it would have been well if David Leslie had held 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 99 

it in his hand that historic morning and catechised 
the Presbyterian ministers with it. One question 
in that Catechism runs thus : " What is the chief 
end of man?" — and its answer: u Man's chief end 
is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." 
Thomas Carlyle says you cannot make a grander 
affirmation than that as the meaning and the end 
of your life. Let us test ourselves with it. You all 
have your faces turned somewhere ; you are marching 
upon some road. Are you quite sure that the end 
of it is to glorify God and to enjoy Him ? The will 
of God is ever goodwill to men. Like the great 
captain of Israel, we can swing our blade with con- 
fidence when it is against enemies of God ; we can 
give the order, too, to march on, if we have 
previously heard it in the secret place from the lips 
of God. 

I remember many years ago, in early Oxford 
days, going for a walk with a friend, some con- 
siderable distance from the university city. In a 
little hamlet we came across a small chapel — 
Wesleyan we took it to be. Entering through 
the open door, we found a poor old woman sweeping 
the floor and dusting the pews. We began to talk 
to her; we saw that the little chapel was part of 
her life ; she had been in at the building of it, and 
she and her husband were at first paid to take care 
of it. But the population drifted away, the members 
became very few, she said. Their spirit was very 
beautiful ; they could not afford to pay her and hei 



LofC. 



ioo THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

husband any longer, so she and he did the work for 
nothing — that is, they did it for God. The husband 
was called home : she was left alone. She went 
on with the work. "When it is too much," she 
said, u a neighbour gives me a helping hand. I am 
glad to do the work ; goodness and mercy have 
followed me all the days of my life. I shall soon 
be over the dark river and at home; until then I 
serve God this way." That simple old woman was 
living no narrower life because she had grown 
poorer and poorer. There was nothing mean about 
her obscurity ; there was something grand in its 
very simplicity ; she had learned the deep secret, 
the way to master sorrow, the way to make life 
full and rich and glad. She was actually standing 
in the middle of Jordan's stream bearing the ark 
of God upon her shoulder, and probably it was true 
that many a life was the better and many a crossing 
the happier because she stood there. 

Contrast with this another case. One Thursday 
there came to me in the vestry a man who had spent 
the greater part of his life in a district not very far 
from this spot. He said he had lived through a 
clean, straight, honourable career; he had done his 
best for God in his little way. But trouble came 
to him just at that time of life when he thought 
he had passed all shoals and shallows, steered safely 
past all rocks, and entered the harbour of old age. 
He was stricken in the tenderest part of his nature ; 
the partner of his life, the one he had sworn to love 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 101 

and cherish, had gone wrong — I need not state the 
vice. His children stood by him, but the thing he 
valued most was wrested from him. Home was 
wrong when peace was gone. He said to me, with 
tears in his eyes : " All Thy billows have gone over 
me." Had I only thought of it then, as I think of 
it now, I would have said : " Not unless you lie 
down in them ; they have only gone over your feet ; 
you are standing right in the midst of the torrent 
of Jordan, and you have to stand there while the 
waves sweep round your feet, but your children 
will pass over with the mighty host more easily if 
you will be a true, strong, and brave man. Keep 
true, keep your head up, and your face towards 
the other shore." God is not done with such a 
man as that : his life was not wasted, and he needed 
not to give way when the moment of testing came. 
You are the priest called to pass before the host; 
to you is given a position of vantage and honour. 
Stand in the torrent till the Captain says : " Cross," 
and then no man can hinder your way. I am not 
preaching any fair-weather Gospel; I know that 
good men go under, as the world counts it, but all 
I am desirous of making you understand is that when 
they go under they go up. No man who has ever 
suffered for right needs your pity, and he knows 
he does not ; he would not take any other way, and 
is perfectly conscious of the recompense. Pass he 
will, and the righteous God brings him through. 
Just as, one by one, we leave our possessions on 



io2 THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 

this side Jordan, as they drop from us in mid- 
stream, one by one they are gathering on the other 
side. " Part of the host has crossed the flood, and 
part is crossing now." 

I would speak a word of personal appeal. 

It may be that I address some man or woman 
who is facing a hard thing this week, and you 
are tempted to compromise with evil, to bring down 
the banner of the Lord, ever so little it may be, 
to forsake that which in your heart you know to 
be the indubitable right. Never allow yourself to 
dally with the temptation even for an instant. 
Look to the other side ; on the other side of every 
hard experience is a greater blessing, so you be 
found faithful. God is ready with His recompense ; 
no flood will ever sweep you away. You are afraid 
of what has not come and never can come. On 
the way to what you know to be the ideal, on the 
way which you are certain is the way of duty, there 
may be a Jordan. March on ; you are not the first 
who has crossed that flood ; the great Captain and 
the great High Priest have gone before you. May 
I change the verb ? It is a singular one : Our 
Captain and our High Priest are one and the same. 
Jesus went through, yet Jesus stands in our midst, 
and holds up the ark of the Lord. Do you re- 
member the way that Jesus took when Jordan 
fronted Him? Setting His face steadfastly to go 
to Jerusalem, He saw there only a Cross, an agony, 
a shame ; and when loving hearts would have turned 



THE WAY THROUGH THE FLOOD 103 

Him aside, He repelled the temptation, for He knew 
whence it sprang. " Get thee behind Me ! " 
Calvary was the Jordan of Jesus ; He went bravely 
forward, crossed the river, and then came back and 
stood in the midst that we might cross under the 
shadow of the Cross of Calvary. 

" There is a land of pure delight, 
Where saints immortal reign, 
Infinite day excludes the night, 
And pleasures banish pain. 

u Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood 
Stand dressed in living green ; 
So to the Jews old Canaan stood, 
While Jordan rolled between. 

" Could we but climb where Moses stood, 
And view the landscape o'er, 
Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood s 
Should fright us from the shore." 



SOME GREAT THING 



" I had some young men in mind in preaching the sermon entitled, 
' Some Great Thing.' It is an attempt to portray to themselves 
some characters which have in them a touch of Stoic pride. 
The preacher's object was to commend the worth of a humble 
confession of Christ — the Christ who is beyond criticism. There 
are some men who resent being placed under obligation even to a 
Redeemer. Pride is a very subtle thing, and not seldom dubs 
itself manliness.'* 



VII 

"And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My 
father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou 
not have done it? how much rather, then, when he saith unto thee, 
Wash, and be clean?" — 2 Kings v. 13. 

Here is another of these Old Testament miracles 
which are so puzzling to the modern, and especially 
to the Western, mind. I have no explanation to 
offer. We can but form our own judgment on the 
facts, and the tale is plainly told. I read it to you 
just now for our lesson. But there are several 
things to be observed concerning this class of 
phenomena before we make the mistake of dis- 
missing this story as a fable. 

First, the modern mind, by which I mean yours 
and mine, trained to believe in the uniformity of 
nature and the universality of law, is naturally 
incredulous concerning what is usually termed 
miracle. The ancient, and especially the Oriental, 
mind, was just the opposite. With us the miracle 
would require more justification than the prophet's 
message. With them, the prophet's message 
received its justification in the miracle. Well, 
now, allowing a great deal for the difference in 
mental attitude between the old and the new, 
between the East and the West, you will have to 

107 



108 SOME GREAT THING 

concede that the man who wrote down this story 
must have believed it word for word. 

Secondly, this miracle is one of an enormous 
class of similar phenomena which occupy the field 
of history and have a tendency to recur. The 
history of mediaeval Christendom is just crammed 
with miracles of the same kind, and, what is more, 
it is exceedingly difficult — nay, it is almost im- 
possible — to rule them out of the field of vision, 
and say that the men who related them, and 
believed that they saw them, never saw them. In 
modern times, take, for example, the Miracles at 
Lourdes or at Holywell, or, to come nearer home 
still, the various faith-healing cults which exist in 
our own land and within a few yards of this very 
Church. I have no wish contemptuously to rule 
them out of the discussion, nor have we any 
business to do anything of the kind. It is my 
belief that expectation does a great deal. Though 
I consider that for a time like ours, for such a life 
as you and I live, it may indicate childishness and 
even weakness of character to be always looking 
for the phenomenal and the thaumaturgical, yet 
we have no business to pour contempt upon the 
records of such when they come across our 
mental vision. As I have just said, expectation 
does a good deal. What we expect has a chance 
of coming to pass. What a good many people 
expect, more or less justifies the expectation. We 
may take it for granted that Naaman was 



SOME GREAT THING 109 

healed because everybody around him expected 
he would be, and observe, he himself was 
not incredulous when he declined to obey the 
prophet's commands. It was simply that his pride 
was hurt. " Dip in Jordan ! " he would have said. 
u Abana and Pharpar are a great deal better. They 
are bigger rivers. If I have to wash and be clean I 
would rather wash at home. Besides, why could 
not the prophet come out ? I am a very great man, 
yet he sends a messenger, and I thought, as I sat 
in my carriage, he would be sure to come out, and 
with a good deal of obsequiousness and deference 
would do some exceptional palmistry, and I should 
go away cured." "I thought." He had prepared 
himself in his mental pose for what did not take 
place. u Wash and be clean " was the curt message. 
" Go to Jordan," and Naaman did not like it. 

Thirdly, after the considerations just advanced, I 
think you and I will be prepared to readjust our 
mental attitude to the problem of the relation of 
mind to matter, and the subjection of the latter to 
the former. I will ask you, therefore, to-night, to 
pass this miracle without further discussion. You 
may take it just as it stands. " There are more 
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in 
our philosophy." 

But it is the psychology of the series of incidents 
here recorded with which we are most concerned. 
How true they are to human nature, and how close 
the parallel between Naaman and ourselves. Here 



no SOME GREAT THING 

is a man stricken with leprosy, and at the same time 
eaten up with pride. If he had been asked to do 
some great thing, he, soldier that he was and master 
of legions, would instantly have done it. A mighty 
man, he expected to be asked to perform a mighty 
feat. When the prophet said, " Go to this Judean 
stream, get out of your carriage, stoop down and 
wash and be clean," he went away in a rage. 

Human nature, which is capable of much grandeur 
of achievement in great things, in special things, 
often breaks down in the presence of small things. 
So it was with Naaman. So, too often, it is with 
us. There are men here to-night, I am perfectly 
sure, who are cavilling in the presence of the 
claims of Christ, and they think it is because they 
themselves are superior to the claim. They suppose 
it is because they have a greater, a more austere, 
ideal than the preacher has to set before them, 
whereas all the time they are simply acting in 
the spirit of Naaman, and do not know that what 
they count a great thing is not the thing that is 
asked of them at all, but some harder thing which 
is not usually called great. God does the great 
things, and does not need humanity to help Him. I 
have in the pulpit with me a letter from a young 
man who read somewhere a sermon that was 
preached here, presumably to young men, on a 
Sunday evening a few weeks ago. Writing in the 
name of three or four others, he says : I think I will 
not read the letter, but sum it up in a few words : — 



SOME GREAT THING 1 1 1 

" We have been reading together the life of the great Stoic 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and to tell you the truth we feel that 
this man's life was a higher and a nobler one than that of most 
Christians, certainly a better life than ours. We wish we could 
attain to his ideal, and it is in no carping spirit that I ask you, Would 
it not be better for some of us to live as well as Marcus Aurelius 
and make less profession of Christianity ? and could not we do as 
well if we were as true as he to the ideal set before us, without 
professing Christianity at all ? " 

I have not sent any reply. I am going to speak it 
now, because I think there is probably more than 
one young man present who could have written that 
letter, and who certainly has that problem. Marcus 
Aurelius represented the later Stoicism of the 
Roman Empire, and I grant you that he was about 
the finest example of it that was ever produced, at 
any rate so far as is known. I will grant further that 
Marcus Aurelius, and all that he stood for, is more 
admirable than a good deal of Christianity in some 
of its modern developments as we see it around us 
to-day. The late Mr Lecky compared it favourably 
with some of the third century developments of 
Christianity — with their asceticism, intolerance, 
fierceness of spirit, and almost brutality of living. 

Well, now, it is not easy to see at first sight why 
Marcus Aurelius should not be your ideal instead of 
the Christian one. Any modern Marcus who has his 
duty before him cannot but be a man to be respected, 
but I will point out something you may never have 
thought of. As a rule, in this self-sufficient type of 
life, there is something vicious at the very base. It 



H2 SOME GREAT THING 

was not so with Marcus, but it was so with his 
philosophy. Stoicism was indigenous to the Roman 
Empire. The Empire was the expression of its 
philosophy. It was one that made strong men but 
austere, and hard and proud. As a rule, Stoicism, 
as it was commonly understood, exhibited nothing 
of the virtue of humility, very little of sympathy. 
It was a Stoic who wrote : — 

" 'Tis sweet when tempests roar upon the sea 
To watch from land another's deep distress, 
Not that his sorrow makes our happiness, 
But that some sweetness there must ever be, 
Watching what sorrows we do not possess." 

You have only to think of the burning heart of 
St Paul uttering himself Godward for the sake of 
his kindred, and willing that he himself might be a 
castaway if so be that they might be saved, and then 
to put beside him the very best that Stoicism ever 
produced, to see that in its noble dignity it came 
something short of that sublime self-abnegation. 
What was there in St Paul that Stoicism never pos- 
sessed? I will tell you. It was strength blended 
with humility and with spiritual sympathy. He 
went deeper down, and he rose higher up than 
Stoicism was ever capable of doing. 

I say this without trying to show how worthless 
the Roman philosophy was — quite the reverse. It 
was a great philosophy. It did a great work in the 
world. But the sun will put out the fire although 
there is fire in the sun. Jesus makes Aurelius un- 



SOME GREAT THING 113 

necessary. And I will venture to think that if ever 
Jesus and Aurelius had met face to face, if Aurelius 
had ever entered into the spirit of the Christians 
that he through a sense of duty persecuted, there 
would have been a Christian Emperor long before 
Constantine. He was not far from the kingdom of 
God. 

History shows us a few such spectacles. Sir 
Matthew Hale, for instance, sat on the bench when 
Bunyan's wife came to plead for her husband. The 
humble-minded judge did not understand, he could 
not see that he was dealing with a hero in that poor 
Bedford tinker who was imprisoned for conscience' 
sake. Someone has written very beautifully, "The 
judge and the prisoner have met in heaven by now 
and understand each other better." Not far apart 
in spirit were they even then. 

Of course you feel that these great souls such as 
Marcus Aurelius, who has been quoted, were not 
very far from Jesus ; but you have only to bring 
Jesus into their company to see that you need not 
follow Aurelius nor make him an ideal, for his ideal 
is absorbed and illuminated by the presence of the 
Son of God. 

There is a good deal of the Stoic temper about 
to-day. When you look back upon Stoicism you are 
doing a very different thing from living in the midst 
of it. It might have been a good thing then for a 
man to live as Aurelius, but now you cannot look 
back upon the line of history without seeing Jesus 

H 



ii4 SOME GREAT THING 

standing in the path. Are you going to pass Him 
to reach the side of Aurelius ? You need never do 
it. All you want and all he ever wanted, noble 
man, was just to understand what Jesus asked, 
and the type and standard for which Jesus lived. 
More than that, Jesus is not simply an example. He 
is a dynamic of the very character that we commend 
in Aurelius himself. The sun puts out the fire, but 
it first kindled it, and it only puts it out when the 
brightness of the shining and the warmth of the 
heat it gives makes the fire necessary no longer. 
I was told at luncheon to-day of a medical man, 
typical of a great many men like you, who was 
asked to come down to the City Temple and listen 
to the preacher. He has no objection whatever to 
the preacher, but he declined. His reason was this 
— " I do not need it. I am trying now to live an 
honourable and upright life. I am doing what I can 
to help my fellows, to lessen the total of suffering in 
the world." You will believe me at once, I am sure, 
when I say that for a man like that I feel a consider- 
able amount of respect, and if it were only a question 
of coming and hearing the preacher I should dismiss 
at once all thought of objecting to his contention. 
This self-respecting man with a moral ideal resembles 
very greatly the Stoic. But he misses something. 
He does not see that it is not the preacher he seeks 
in the house of God, it is the something for which 
the preacher stands. He does not see that the 
person he is rejecting is not the preacher, and the 



SOME GREAT THING 115 

preacher's counsel has the sanction of his own moral 
ideal. Why does he not penetrate behind the why 
and the wherefore of the very life he himself seeks 
to live ? In all charity — and my words are imper- 
sonal — you will allow me to give the reason. It is 
because of "The Great Thing." He prefers to do 
it rather than to have it done for him. And, mind 
you, in every character where that is the prevailing 
mood and governs the life there is something short 
of the highest. In history grand things have been 
done by men who could not stoop, and just because 
they could not stoop missed the best and highest of 
all. It was a great day when a message was sent 
from Paris in the incipient stage of the Revolution 
to the city of Marseilles, " Send us six hundred men 
who know how to die." They found them on the 
instant, and from the march of the six hundred men 
upon Paris the history of Europe has been changed. 
The " Marseillaise " was sung for the first time. 

It was a great day in the history of the world — 
though England was playing then a less noble part 
— when a young American in the grip of the English 
soldiers wrote " The Star-Spangled Banner," with 
shot and shell flying over his head, but a great 
enthusiasm, a noble and unselfish patriotism in his 
heart. He would have dared and done anything. 
It was a great thing to write that song, and he wrote 
it there. 

It was a great day in the history of humanity 
when Cromwell sat on his horse on the shores of 



n6 SOME GREAT THING 

Dunbar and lifted up his voice, along with his 
invincible Ironsides, and sang " Let God arise, let 
His enemies be scattered." It was a great thing 
nobly done. But he did some more things in his 
life equally great that were not so conspicuous, and 
one of the sweetest of all was his dying prayer, a 
prayer not first and foremost of strength, but of 
humility. " Lord, bless Thy people. Thou hast 
made me the means of doing them some good and 
Thee service. Pardon those who would trample 
upon the dust of a poor worm, and give us a good 
night, for Jesus' sake." That man could stoop as 
well as rise, and that is why his sweep through the 
firmament of history is so magnificent as it is. He 
could do a great thing, but he did not despise the 
day of small things. Nay, he was willing that the 
greatest thing should be done for him — he stooped 
low at the Cross of Christ. 

Now, my young hearers, if I were to call you to 
some great deed of heroism, would you not respond? 
(Pardon me for suggesting that I, too, may venture 
to-night to stand in the place of the prophet of 
God.) I know you would — that spirit is not dead. 
There are many people who think that chivalry and 
idealism have passed out of English life. Nothing 
of the sort ! If I were to ask for volunteers for a 
forlorn hope by to-morrow, and you knew they were 
needed, we should get them. I remember watching 
at Bloemfontein the taking of the Waterworks, 
when for the moment the supply had been cut off 



SOME GREAT THING 117 

by the Boers. It was a terrible sight, though, after 
all, there was not much to see, but only what it 
suggested. Common, ordinary men, such as you 
and I meet in the street any day, were marching up 
that hill of death line by line, with no perturbation, 
no undue haste. Slowly, deliberately, heroically, 
the British soldiers moved to the summit of the hill 
that was held by the hidden foe, taking cover where 
they could, but rising in the open when they must. 
They just did it. It was called for. It was duty. 
Those same men would drink and swear on Sunday 
night in the public-houses in London. We know 
them. They were capable of the great thing when 
it was called for. You never dreamed as you met 
them that there was the hero in them, but it was 
there, just as surely as it is in you. 

We read every day of some story of heroism in 
the manning of the lifeboat, in the saving of com- 
rades from the explosion in the coal mine, and we 
know the men who do it, poor material, too, but 
capable of a great thing. And if to-morrow our 
country were in extremity, if we saw men in peril, 
and it meant the giving up of life in the attempt to 
rescue them, and we called for men to do it, they 
would come. I would guarantee to gather out of 
this church a devoted band who could do the great 
thing. 

Yes, you can do all this, but there are some things 
you cannot or will not do. Why is it that so many 
manly fellows will have nothing to do with religion, 



n8 SOME GREAT THING 

are afraid to confess God — nay, more, are still less 
willing to confess Christ than they are to name God? 
God is only real to you in Christ, but I have noticed 
this, though I am not always able to account for it, 
that the word a God" may come to a man's lips 
where he feels a great delicacy and reluctance about 
the utterance of the word u Christ." Why ? Be- 
cause somehow the utterance of the latter means a 
certain amount of self-committal. If a man names 
Christ with reverence and a touch of simplicity and 
tenderness, it is implied that he belongs to Him. 
You might storm a height at the cannon's mouth, 
but you do not care for the shame and ridicule that 
might come from the charge of inconsistency or of 
weakness. You give all sorts of reasons for your 
abstention, and you think them true. Suppose we 
examine some of them. 

I know you in your business house. You are 
straight enough. Up to a certain point your 
standard is as clear and honourable as that of the 
medical man I have just named. But you know as 
well as I do that standard only holds good up to a 
point. It would be a great deal easier to stand with 
Aurelius than with Christ. All the moral dignity 
and the strength and the suggestion, all the self- 
respect that heightens into pride, is easy. That is 
as simple as drawing your breath. You would be 
ashamed of telling a lie for instance — it is easy to 
tell the truth and shame the devil. You will not 
stoop to lie. I will tell you what you will not stoop 



SOME GREAT THING n 9 

to, either. You will not stoop to a confession of 
need. You are prepared for the great thing. 
There is still a greater, only it does not seem 
greater, because you come down to it instead of up, 
and that is where you do not want to go. Do you 
understand what the sentiment means of 

" Thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) 
The submission of Man's nothing-perfect to God's All-Complete, 
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet ! " 

Listen to this man's reason for not joining himself to 
Christ. "Oh," he says, "I can live a good life 
without your Christ. I am trying to do it. Do not 
ask me for professions which I cannot keep. There 
is no need for them." Is there not? " You can live 
a good life without Christ." Do you not detect the 
pride in the statement ? Do you see what it means ? 
It is the thrusting back upon self, as it were, the 
entire responsibility for life. You will get broken 
at that business, young man, before you have gone 
very far. If not Christ, then somebody else for a 
helping hand — it has been tried before and has been 
as big a failure as you are making it. You can 
manage without Christ in the living of the right 
life? Let us examine the life and see. There you 
have a record of it moment by moment, fact by fact, 
across the whole consciousness of humanity. Im- 
possible ! for you know quite well you have failed 
before the ideal time and again. You cannot live 
your life, your right life, without faith in some thing 



120 SOME GREAT THING 

or in some one, and before the days have gone much 
further you will find yourself longing and yearning 
for a stronger hand than yours to save your manhood. 
Oh, you can live it, if you will stop short. But 
Aurelius' standard will not do. There is something 
more austere and exacting still, where you will not 
be required to do the great thing. It will be done 
for you. Can you stoop to it and rise? If the 
prophet had bid thee do some great thing wouldest 
thou not have done it ? How much more, then, 
when he asks thee to leave thy burden in the hands 
of the strong One, the Eternal, the "Saviour, Re- 
deemer, and Friend." 

Here is another. "Christians," he says, in self- 
justification, "are no better than other people." 
Leave Christians alone. To your own Master you 
stand or fall. I know all about the weakness and 
the waywardness of Christians. It is not too much 
to say that Christians have given me, for instance, a 
worse time than other people have. But you have 
nothing to do with them. When you stand before 
the throne on the great day — and it is coming, this 
great day of discovery — you will not be asked how 
John Smith or Tom Jones lived. You will be asked 
whether you followed and obeyed and lived to the 
ideal that was given to you. If you have seen the 
Highest, cleave to it, for be sure the highest will 
be required of you. You need not be ashamed of 
being found in the company of Christ. You are only 
asked to confess your need of Him. 



SOME GREAT THING 121 

Once upon a time a man in some such mood as 
yours drew to that same Lord as He stood, a seem- 
ing peasant, upon the roadway in Galilee, and kneeled 
down at His feet, and this is how He prayed — "Good 
Master " — that is just what you are saying, you go 
so far as that, anybody, and pay Him a compliment 
— " Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit 
eternal life ? " He was perfectly sincere, so are you. 
His life did not satisfy him, he wanted a better — 
just like you. And the Master's reply was nothing 
doctrinal, very simple, " Thou knowest the com- 
mandments, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear 
false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother." 
The answer came, " Master, all these I have kept 
from my youth up." The Master knew him, and, 
speaking straight to the deepest in him, said, " One 
thing thou lackest. Go and sell everything you 
possess and give it to the poor, and follow Me." 
There was one thing he would not do. He did the 
grand thing of falling down in the street — it meant 
a good deal to do that. But when the Master said, 
" Give your all," he was not prepared for that. I 
have known a man honest enough to say that in my 
time. " I have some things I do not feel willing to 
give up. Christ cannot have them, so I cannot have 
Christ." But for one such man there are ten thou- 
sand who will not acknowledge the real reason for 
" staying away." It is that they are prepared for 
the great thing, but not for the lesser, which nobody 
sees. And the great thing in your case may be just 



122 SOME GREAT THING 

what you are doing and doing with a worthy manhood. 
But there is something else required, and it may be 
nothing but a giving up. You are no hero if you 
can only be a hero by a spurt and with the band 
playing, as it were. You are a hero if you are pre- 
pared to go down as well as to go up, to give to 
Christ all that you have and are, as well as to do 
something conspicuously brave and sublime in His 
service under the gaze of men. If the prophet 
had bid thee do some great thing, I know it would 
have been done. How, then, when he asks thee to 
come to the Cross and leave everything there and 
yield heart and mind and soul into the keeping of 
Him, and Him only Who is really strong. 

There is a heroism which is as great as any 
I have seen. Look at the heroism of John Wesley ! 
He learned something between two periods in 
his life, the former when he was going out 
to America as a young man. When the storm 
came he screamed and trembled. He was like a 
woman — I withdraw that word — he was in terror of 
the elements. Some of the sailors laughed at him, 
for they were men who could face the great thing, 
he was not. They would have gone down into the 
great deep if necessary, the heroes that they were. 
Wesley, the Christian, was not. But he saw some- 
thing that filled him with awe, a little group of men 
and women, Moravian Christians, standing and sing- 
ing, singing in the midst of the tempest, as near to 
God by sea as they were by land, and altering their 



SOME GREAT THING 123 

demeanour no whit for the presence of the storm. 
Wesley felt there was something missing in him, 
and he learned, and the time came when that same 
man was gripped by a murderous crowd and led to 
what seemed certain death. All through one 
memorable night Wesley, the preacher, who only 
sought their good, was being hurried hither and 
thither, now to be drowned, now to be stoned, now 
to be hanged, as the mood of the mob changed. He 
was none of them, but it would not have mattered 
— he was ready. His own account of it was this — 
he was just as quiet and just as undemonstrative 
when he was the obscure person whom England 
would not have said very much about it if he had 
been murdered, as he was in the great assembly 
when he stood face to face with thousands and tens 
of thousands of listening hearers — just the same man 
in the moment of sublime victory, and the same man 
prepared to face ignominy and shame and death. 
What made the difference? Why, Wesley had 
found the real Christ, and the real Christ made a 
hero as great as any Aurelius of them all, a hero, 
too, who could show himself such on all occasions, 
and a hero whose dignity was present, not in hard- 
ness in the time of such conflict as I have described, 
such thrilling danger, but in sweetness and in sym- 
pathy and in love. He would have knelt and prayed 
for these same murderers, and would have counted 
it a glorious thing if he had been destroyed for their 
sakes, if they had been gathered into the kingdom. 



i2 4 SOME GREAT THING 

It is to such a character as that I am calling you, 
and to such an ideal as that I summon you. It is a 
great thing, only the world does not always count it 
such. If you will expect some great thing, it will be 
by taking a greater thing from Christ Himself. He 
will make you capable of it. You will be glad to 
owe it to Him. You will go back to your business 
to-morrow prepared for scorn, you will go back to 
be taunted, if need be, with something you feel 
conscience requires you to do or to leave undone, 
and you will defy the conventions of society. Many 
would rush to the point of the bayonet who would 
not do that. The great want of the present hour is 
moral grit. Dare to live your true life. Let no man 
interfere with you in your relations with your God. 
And if you know a thing to be true and feel it to be 
demanded of you and see it to be the highest that 
has ever crossed your path, and you feel your urgent 
need of the clasp of the Lord Divine, why, my brother, 
surrender ! It will be the grandest thing you ever 
did in your life, far more so than following the petty 
ideals which now satisfy you. If the prophet asked 
for some great thing, he would get it from you. 
The forgiveness of sin, the strengthening of man- 
hood for the battle with the tempter, all are from 
Him Who is really the source of good in every man, 
whether he acknowledges Him or not, "that in all 
things He might have the pre-eminence " He de- 
serves. " Humble yourselves under the mighty hand 
of God, and He shall lift you up." "If any man 



SOME GREAT THING 125 

willeth to do the will of My Father which is in 
heaven, he shall know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God or whether I speak of Myself." 
" For whoso loveth his life shall lose it ; but 
whoso loseth his life for My sake shall keep it unto 
life eternal." 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 
ETERNAL LIFE 



This sermon was asked for by some of the younger members of 
the congregation. It gave rise to some questioning on the part of 
those at whose request the text had been chosen. As a result 
of this questioning a further aspect of the subject was treated some 
weeks later, and entitled the Law of Retribution. The supreme 
difficulty of those who correspond with me upon these sermons 
appears to have been the content of the word Eternal. Some have 
understood me to teach that all sin revenges itself in an everlasting 
sequence without hope of remedy, while others, oddly enough, 
have understood me to mean that sin is punished in this life and in 
this life alone. I need hardly point out to readers of these two 
sermons that in my view of this great and solemn subject there is 
no possibility of avoiding what is commonly termed the punishment 
of sin. But punishment has a merciful purpose, and repentance, 
which shrinks not to accept the consequences of sin, secures in the 
divine order their certain transformation into good. Eternal life 
is expressed in kind, not in duration, and every true follower of 
Christ is in possession of it now. 



VIII 



"These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous 
into life eternal." — St Matthew xxv. 46. 



To-night I wish to teach rather than exhort, or to 
exhort only by the teaching and its implications. This 
text is a most solemn and important utterance of our 
Lord, and we have no reason to doubt that the 
parable in which it appears is given to us substantially 
as it came from Him. But you may have observed 
for yourselves that the words of the text do not 
appear in the Revised Version of the New Testa- 
ment precisely as they appear in the Authorised, and 
the change is not unimportant. The Authorised 
Version reads, as you have already heard, " These 
shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the 
righteous into life eternal." Now the word which is 
translated "everlasting" in the former part of the 
text is precisely the word which is translated 
" eternal " in the latter part. Therefore the revisers 
of the New Testament have given us the sentence 
thus: — "These shall go away into eternal punish- 
ment: but the righteous into eternal life." The 
word " everlasting " represents the received theology 
of the seventeenth century, when the Authorised 
Version of the Bible, as we have it, and in many 

I "9 



130 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

ways the more admirable version, was first promul- 
gated. The word " eternal," however, which takes 
its place in the Revised Version, is so much truer to 
what I feel our Lord's meaning must have been that 
I would like to dwell upon what I take to be its 
content for a few moments. 

Any Greek, or any person accustomed to speak 
Greek amongst those who first heard our Lord make 
use of this word, would be in no doubt as to its 
meaning. Perhaps our Lord did speak in Greek. 
Greek was well understood throughout the whole 
region in which His teaching was given. It was 
what French became a little while ago to modern 
Europe, the language of common intercourse as be- 
tween people who spoke various and little understood 
dialects. Perhaps He did not speak in Greek. He 
may have spoken in Aramaic. If so, you may be 
perfectly sure that the word which is rendered by 
this Greek term " eternal " was one which in our 
Lord's mind bore exactly the same meaning. 

Now, what does " eternal " mean ? I will give 
you one of its meanings first, which I may call its 
lesser meaning, and which though not necessarily 
contradicting the larger meaning, certainly limits it. 
It may mean " age-long." The word "eternal" is 
aiwviog and it has for its root M* " an age," or a vague 
period of time. What our Lord may have meant to 
say here is, "These shall go away into age-long 
punishment," not specifying how long, "and the 
righteous into age-long life." 



ETERNAL LIFE 131 

But as you see, and it is often pointed out, this 
interpretation of the term logically carries with it 
this conclusion, that as the punishment of the wicked 
is not necessarily endless but age-long, so the bliss 
of the righteous is not endless either. We feel at 
once, then, that our Lord could not be speaking 
in such indefinite language as to hold out a sort 
of limited hope to those who lived worthily and 
righteously in this world. It is not age-long life 
that He promises. It is something vaster, nobler 
than that. 

Well, then, we will put aside that one meaning. 
As I have said, it does not necessarily contradict 
what I am now going to tell you, but it certainly limits 
it. The word "eternal," however, as used in the 
Greek language, may mean — often does mean — 
that which is outside of, and above, and tran- 
scends, and supersedes time. Or we will put 
it in another way, the eternal is the real, as 
opposed to the seeming. Please bear that in mind 
while we are going a little further in our examina- 
tion of the text. The way in which many under- 
stand this text, even those who do not believe it, is 
that " eternal " is equivalent to " everlasting." Let 
me give you an illustration. I was reading only last 
night, in a paper which appears week by week — I 
may as well name it, I have named it before, it is 
called T. P.'s Weekly — a little chapter of autobio- 
graphy in which the well-known journalist whose 
name is given to the paper, describes his own 



i 3 2 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

childhood. Mr T. P. O'Connor says, that one of 
the ideas which came home to his imagination 
most forcibly when a boy, was that of eternity, 
and it was because at the school which he 
attended, and which I take to have been a Roman 
Catholic school, there were certain seasons when 
the boys were required to abstain from play, from 
the usual indulgences of boyhood, and betake them- 
selves to meditation and devotion. Amongst the 
books which Mr O'Connor then read was one which 
he said brought home to him with the utmost force 
the idea of eternity. This, he says, is the way it 
was taught. Speaking of the fate of the impenitent, 
the writer of the little devotional manual went on to 
say — Supposing at the end of a million years of 
torment, a soul who had been condemned to ever- 
lasting punishment were to raise himself from his 
agony and ask what time it was, the answer would 
be " It is eternity." At the end of another million 
years suppose the same soul again to raise his 
suffering eyes and ask what time it was, the answer 
would come just the same — " Eternity, and eternity 
is only beginning." To an imaginative boy such as 
Mr O'Connor must have been, I can well understand 
with what pungency the content of eternity as thus 
presented must have come home to him. But it 
is an awful thing to think of eternity in that way. 
If Mr O'Connor were as learned in the history of 
thought as he certainly is master of letters he would 
know that to a Greek that was not eternity, but it 



ETERNAL LIFE 133 

is quite true of his mediaeval theology — and there 
was not a pin to choose in that respect between 
Romanism and Calvinism; we have not escaped it 
to-day; it is still in our midst, and my solemn 
purpose to-night is to address you who have ceased 
to believe it and have not known what to put in its 
place. I was passing the other day by a great 
expanse of advertising wall, and I saw on it in large 
letters, put there by some zealous follower of 
Christ, "Where will you spend Eternity?" and 
mentally I instantly amended the phrase to myself, 
"How am I spending eternity?" We have a way 
of thinking of eternity as coming by and by, that 
it will be endless time. Believe me, my brethren, 
eternity is not coming ; it is here, it is now. We 
are speaking as if we had something to wait and to 
watch for. " Where will you spend eternity ? " 
But the thought which has most authority with 
conscience ought to be this, " What am I doing in 
eternity ? How am I using the eternal now ? " 

For brethren — here I beg that you will give me 
your patient attention for a moment — there is really 
no such thing as time. The eternal is the only real. 
You cannot put a bound to time at either end. 
Follow history back as far as it will go till it is lost 
in the dim regions of antiquity, and ask what lies 
beyond at that end. Endless time; in a word, 
infinity of days. And follow through the hours 
when your life ends, until history ends, too, at the 
other end. Can you put a bound to time there, and 



i 3 4 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

what is the term? There is no term. Time is 
endless. There again is infinity of days. Pluck 
out of the midst of it your twenty, thirty, forty, 
fifty years of life, and how much is left of the 
grand total ? Precisely what there was before you 
began counting, infinity of days. The moment you 
try to grasp this thought it eludes you. Yet there 
is no escape from the conclusion that there is no 
time, there is only eternity. I cannot mark eternity 
off in days, and weeks, and months, and years, and 
centuries, because it is only God's unchanging now. 
The fact is, time, like space, is a sort of limita- 
tion imposed on thought. I say like space. Let 
me illustrate again. I look towards the west wall of 
the building wherein I am speaking. What lies 
beyond that barrier ? Space. And beyond it ? Yet 
again space. And what beyond that ? Imagination 
can carry you no further — infinity. At this end 
infinity too, so west, north, and south, there is no 
boundary to that whereon you stand. Hold firmly 
for a moment to the thought. If I could lift you 
and the Church and all that appeals to our senses 
here, out of the midst of this infinity, how much 
would be left ? Just as much as there was before. 
You can take no section of the infinite. All that 
we are compelled to say concerning this fact, which 
is a fact, and an unescapable fact too, is, space does 
not exist. I am compelled to think in its categories 
just as I am compelled to think in the categories of 
time, but neither of them really is. Neither time 



ETERNAL LIFE 135 

nor space, but only eternity and the infinite are 
true. 

Now, brethren, if you have followed me in my 
philosophising so far — every one of us is an embryo 
philosopher — may I ask you to look again at our 
text. The temporal is that within which we are 
limited. The conception of everlasting, even, is an 
instance of that limitation. We speak of eternity 
as time added to time added to time added to time 
ad infinitum. It is impossible. There is no such 
thing. The time element must come out. The 
fact that we are conscious of it is simply a proof 
of our limitation. Why we should be thus limited 
we do not fully know, but sometimes I think I see 
glimpses of the reason. It is that we may know 
against the dark background of evil the meaning of 
the good. We may not know very much about the 
mystery of life, but we know just enough to find a 
right way through it. The man who is living for 
what he feels to be highest, for what he knows to 
be the right, has it always written with unmistakable 
plainness within him. That man knows that he is 
moving towards escape from his limitation. By 
every good act or thought we rise above our limita- 
tion, as it were, and come into immediate relationship 
with the life which never changes, which is the life 
of God, and thus we are prepared a little for an 
understanding of our Lord's strange words in the 
seventeenth of St John : " This is life eternal, that 
they might know Thee, the only true God, and 
Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent." 



136 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

By implication, what are we to say, then, is the 
absence of this? Can I find a better word than 
punishment ? Punishment is limitation accepted, 
punishment is the placing of the soul in a prison- 
house, punishment is to dwell in the eternal with- 
out seeing that it is eternal, punishment is to be 
content with the material, though the material may 
bring pain to the soul. Punishment, in a word, is 
prison, liberty is eternal life. Every evil thought 
or deed is limitation accepted. Death will not 
free you, for death itself is only an incident in 
eternity. 

" As the tree falls, so must it lie ; 
As a man lives, so shall he die." 

Now I trust I have shown you something of what 
eternity really means. It is God's now. The in- 
troductory words of our parable show that this is 
so. " When the Son of Man shall come in His 
glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall 
He sit on the throne of His glory, and before Him 
shall be gathered all the nations." When ? Now. 
You are not waiting for the judgment, it is going 
on. You are before the judgment seat of Christ 
at this moment. All your thoughts are read in the 
light of the eternal. God makes no mistakes. The 
mercy of Christ is such that it will not spare. 

It is impossible not to believe in eternal punish- 
ment. Every act, every thought of evil draws to 
itself its own inevitable result. " Be not deceived, 
God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, 



ETERNAL LIFE 137 

that shall he also reap." We are not waiting for 
eternity to have the balance put right. Men may- 
feel that they have dodged God, as it were. They 
have not. Some of us who have been trying to 
live righteously feel as though it were well with the 
unrighteous. It never is. Inevitably, here or on 
the other side of death, wrong living works itself 
out in tragedy. There is no tragedy so dreadful 
as that of the soul which has sinned against itself. 
What is punishment but the imprisonment of the 
soul in its own wickedness? Retribution is ab- 
solutely inevitable and unescapable. Some of you 
talk as though it were never so. I have heard it 
said that the moment you eliminate the time element 
from the thought of eternity you have taken away 
its dread. It is the exact opposite with me. The 
moment I take the time element out it seems as 
if eternity is crashing upon me. I feel as though it 
were impossible to doubt that the lash descends, 
the punishment comes, the prison door is closed 
upon the soul. You told a lie, that lie has turned 
to rend you, has shut you under its own baleful 
influence. You turned from the pathway of right 
towards sensual self-indulgence, and lo ! you become 
a prisoner of your flesh, and of the flesh see corrup- 
tion. You do harm to another, and by and by the 
harm comes back again to you with compound in- 
terest. " He that speakest against Me wrongeth his 
own soul." Men talk about eternity as though they 
could afford to wait for it and will be prepared for 



138 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

God's judgments when they come. They know 
very little of the real meaning of the judgment. 
Here and now, with resistless force — for God cannot 
be cajoled — descends the penalty of a sinful life. 

Some of you are living as it were like a man 
sleeping in the topmost storey of a burning house 
and telling himself that there is no danger until 
the fire reaches that floor. The foundations are 
gone. So it is with evil life. The man who lives 
falsely is already undermined by the judgments of 
God. It is punishment to be shut off from eternal 
life and beauty, joy, love. Death itself can give 
him no rescue. It simply takes the bad man, as it 
were, from one prison-house to another, and gives 
him on the way a glimpse of the blue sky above 
and the fresh sweet air in the midst of which he 
might live and ought to have lived. All punishment 
is eternal. All true living is eternal. God's eternal 
now is the one thing from which the bad man 
cannot escape and the good man does not want to 
escape. 

There is nothing like illustration. May I close 
my sermon with one ? Suppose we had before us 
here two rich men. I have no sympathy with the 
cant which speaks as though it were an absurd idea 
for a man to dream of being rich. Wealth is power. 
All power may be used for good. But there is 
a point beyond which no man can strive for 
money without perilling his soul, and I will show 
you what I mean. We have heard of a millionaire 



ETERNAL LIFE 139 

— he shall be nameless for the moment — who spent 
his life in amassing money by every means in his 
power. He had no scruples as to the way in 
which he obtained it. He would rob on a large 
scale or a small. Conscience appeared to be dead. 
He was only a scourge to the community in the 
land in which he lived. In the end, one day, in 
a drunken delirium, he leapt overboard and the 
ocean swallowed him. Does anybody feel that 
there was no tragedy in an end like that ? I do 
not say it was inevitable. That man might have 
lived a cool, calculating, hardened ruffian, steeled 
against the opinion of the world. Would he have 
escaped tragedy? I trow not. He might have 
waited till the last dread hour when the summons 
came which no man can refuse to obey, and then 
he would see that his guilty gold had built a prison- 
house around his shrivelled soul, and out of that 
prison-house he could find no means of escape. 

Some theologians would say eternity would be 
the beginning of his self-discovery. Eternity — 
eternity is here. Death may have been the begin- 
ning of his self-discovery of his misuse of eternity, and 
the penalty descends upon him who had gained all 
he sought to gain, but in the gaining had lost his 
soul. 

But here is another man, and I do not shrink 
from naming him. We will say a Samuel Morley 
stands before us. God has blessed this man with 
this world's goods and abundance of them. But 



i 4 o ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

what use does he make of them ? How many souls 
have been lifted nearer God for the helping hand 
and the power of Samuel Morley? How many 
lives have been sweeter, how much corruption has 
been swept away, who can tell ? Wealth could not 
build a prison-house around that man's soul. It 
rather furnished him with wings to fly. Poor men, 
do not mistake me. God has given you your op- 
portunities, too. They are not the same as Samuel 
Morley's. Making friends of the Mammon of un- 
righteousness is a perilous thing to do, and without 
it you may enter into the eternal habitations. 

Let me give you another figure. Here is a 
young roue who has brought down his father's grey 
hairs in sorrow to the grave. Many a worthy man 
has an unworthy son, and of all unsolved problems 
I think the problem of an evil succession to a noble 
example, a bad son to a good father, is one of the 
greatest. This lad has broken the heart of the 
nearest and dearest. He has had every indulgence 
that money could buy, every opportunity that human 
affection could give, all to no purpose. Those who 
loved him had simply furnished him with the means 
to destroy himself. A sort of sinister devil seems 
to possess him. He knows the anguish he has 
caused, and some day, when he has run his course 
and has no more to hope for from boon companions 
in this life, when all the means that were once at 
his disposal for the ruin of himself and others are 
squandered, when he, as a derelict on the ocean of 



ETERNAL LIFE 141 

life comes to himself, young men, that roue must be 
suffering the tortures of the damned. He is not 
waiting for some hell of a million years ; he has a 
hell of to-day, he has the horror of this night, he 
has the feeling of tragic failure. He knows himself 
in the grip of a demon whom he cannot shake off. 
He has exchanged heaven for hell, and love for 
hate. What sort of punishment do you call that ? 
I call it the punishment of God's unchanging now. 
As he has sown, so he has reaped. The penalty 
did not wait. It descended upon him with the first 
sin. The second was easier because of that. The 
sequence you now see. 

Here is yet another, quite different from 
either of these two, a man present, perhaps, in 
the congregation. A Christian? Oh, no, nothing 
so weak and so childish as that ! This man is 
superior to all the ordinary sanctions of that curious 
snivelling creature called a Christian — is a man 
of the world. He is as hard as a flint. He does 
not stand very high in the opinion of mankind, 
but you cannot describe him as a failure. No man 
can get inside the joints of his armour. He knows 
well how to defend himself. Do not appeal to this 
man for pity. Do not appeal to his better self. He 
seems to have none. It was not always so. He 
had once. Mark the dread law. That man has 
stifled every good impulse. Meaning to get on in 
life he has trampled under foot all that he formerly 
held to be noble. All his squeamishness has left 



142 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

him. He no longer has scruples. When he wants 
a thing he gets it ; if he feels he would like to do a 
thing he does not stop to measure whether in the 
judgment of the eternal it is good or bad. He is 
too hard. What can you expect from this man ? 
No Gospel will ever find entry through his sheet 
armour. All I can say is that the inevitable moment 
is coming when the cumulative penalty of the way 
he has been living will come home to him. He may 
be too insensible ever to know what it means on 
this side of death. You go hoping that at the 
deathbed of the wicked you may see a belated 
repentance. Nothing of the kind. Ten to one he 
will die as callous as he lives. But then ? But 
then ? The poor shrivelled soul will pass into the 
presence of his Maker, but not into liberty, not to 
gladness, only to disillusion and the outer darkness, 
one prison-house exchanged for another. You would 
not change with him now. He is in prison and 
does not see it, but you see it and you do not want 
to go where he is, where he lives, even now. He 
has trifled with eternity here, and now eternity is 
avenging itself upon him. He is shut away from 
God, and the worm that dieth not is busy with 
him — remorse, self-loathing, the conscience is 
tortured with the thought of forfeited possibility 
and the long, long night that lies between him and 
righteousness again. How much more, who shall 
say, but all this is said by our Lord in this figure 
of the Last Judgment. It is not the judgment that 



ETERNAL LIFE 143 

has been waiting. That man was a prisoner long 
ago, but he did not know it. The hour comes 
when he does know it, and then he feels what was 
true before, the punishment eternal is upon him. 

Will you compare with these depressing and 
sinister examples another I will give you? I could 
choose if I liked some suffering saint with whom 
suffering seems to be limitation in this world, and 
nothing is liberty and little joy. But I will not. 
I will choose just some ordinary man out of this 
congregation and make his experience speak. Here 
is a business man in a small way, just an ordinary 
man, a hundred of whom you will meet in the course 
of a hundred yards to-morrow on your way to the 
city. This man is trying to do right, to live the 
straight life, to keep near to God. He feels there 
is a God to serve, a God who is one of righteousness 
and love. That man has not been prosperous in the 
world. Do you think he has made a bad invest- 
ment ? If you could get that man to stand up and 
speak to you, he would say that if he had his time 
to come over again and his sacrifice to make, for the 
sake of the right and the true he would make it over 
again. There is a blessing now. There is a voice 
that speaks within. There is an experience of 
which nobody can rob him. He knows what that 
is. This is life eternal, that this man's eyes are 
fixed upon God. He has risen above his prison- 
house. The world may refuse him his rewards, but 
with God he already is in spirit at one, and this is 



144 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

life eternal. Moreover, there is a day coming to him 
when he who now sees as through a glass darkly 
shall see face to face, when the last barrier falls 
down, when the last veil is removed. O glorious 
liberty of the children of God ! " His righteousness 
shall shine forth as the noonday in the Kingdom of 
the Father." 

Mark our Lord's solemn teaching concerning the 
great Revelation to come. It is not the number of 
propositions you could repeat about God ; it is the 
way you have lived. I have been astonished some- 
times to reflect how it is that the theologians so 
often miss the point of this parable. What is it 
all about? Some of the people who were most 
astonished when they heard the Master's "Come, 
ye blessed of My Father," were those who did not 
know they had been standing in the forefront of 
the battle, and did not know they had been on the 
watchtowers waiting for the coming of the morning. 
I will tell you what they did know. They knew 
what it was to live nobly, and they triumphed. 
There are some men before me doing that now. 
Well, my brother, I want to speak to you one word 
of revelation from the heart of the Most High. 
You are on the right way. I beseech you to see 
all that lies before you in so far as God means you 
to see. And there is one thing I think He means 
you to see, and that is that the smile of the Father 
is yours, that the presence of the Saviour divine is 
with you all the days, that you have never won a 



ETERNAL LIFE 145 

victory yet in a strength that was your own and 
yours alone, and when you have seemed least sup- 
ported as it has seemed to you and to the world, 
all the omnipotence of the Eternal has been behind 
you, and all the glory of the Father has been shining 
upon you. Simple faith would lift you higher than 
you have ever been. Trust God. Righteousness 
and love are behind all, after all, and best of all. 
When the scales fall away, oh, the expansion of 
revelation ! This is life eternal. 

I remember once speaking to a friend of mine 1 
in Brighton who, giving me his experience of his 
own childhood, said, " I can remember when my 
mother cried as she cut the bread for our breakfast, 
keeping none back for herself, for it was the last 
crust that she was dividing. I, the eldest born, 
inquired the reason why this was done. It has 
kept me straight in the world ever since under 
terrible temptation. She said, 4 My lad, your father 
has been dismissed from his situation because he 
would not lie, and we have come to the last loaf, 
but I am proud of your father, and you must grow 
up like him too.' " " And," said my friend, for he 
is a friend in a very humble position, " I have tried 
to do it. The example of that great sacrifice is 
before me, that solemn and sad morning when it 
seemed as if we had come to the last, and God 
let us go through and remained silent. But it 
was not the last. Somehow I felt that morning 

1 This man is also referred to on p. -4.97^ > ,-> 1 



i 4 6 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND 

as if I stood higher, I was so proud of my father's 
manhood, and to-day as I look back and remember 
that we did come through many a hardship, it 
is true, but we have come through. I would not 
barter our faith, our quietness of heart, the mutual 
love and respect of our home circle for all that the 
world could give, if we had to leave those things 
outside." 

What shall I call that ? This is true life, is it not ? 
When we get to heaven we do not expect to find 
another sort, we expect to find that. That kind 
of manhood in upon the throne of the universe. 
It went there by the Cross of Calvary. This is 
life indeed, and this is life eternal. 

I can imagine someone asking me, " How am I to 
get into this eternal life, for it seems as if sin closes 
me round and the world is too much for me, tempta- 
tion too strong, and I cannot escape. You threaten, 
but you cannot save." You remind me of some 
people I have heard about. One of them came 
and kneeled down in the streets one day to one 
whom he took to be a Galilean peasant whose 
vision he felt was greater than his own, and this 
is what he said, " Good Master, what shall I do 
that I may inherit eternal life ? " The man saw 
something better than he had ever seen before. 
" Lord, to whom shall we go ? " said a poor 
fisherman, "Thou hast the words of eternal life." 
So we will go with the young ruler and with 
Peter the fisherman and we will kneel down at the 



ETERNAL LIFE 147 

same feet and we will remember that that life, that 
noble life of Christ, that stainless life can never die. 
He is not only living now, He is living in your very 
midst if you only knew it. His is the true life, the 
ageless life, the deathless life, eternal life. " I am 
come that they might have life and that they might 
have it more abundantly." 

" O ! how shall I whose native sphere 

Is dark, whose mind is dim, 
Before the Ineffable appear, 
And on my naked spirit bear 

The uncreated beam ? 

" There is a way for man to rise 

To that sublime abode : — 
An offering and a sacrifice, 
A Holy Spirit's energies, 

An Advocate with God : — 

" These, these prepare us for the sight 

Of Holiness above ; 
The sons of ignorance and night 
May dwell in the Eternal Light 

Through the Eternal Love ! " 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 



See Preface to preceding sermon* 



IX 



* If thy hand cause thee to offend, cut it off; it is better for thee to 
enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the 
fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the 
fire is not quenched." — St Mark ix. 43, 44. 

Some time ago, when preaching from the parable of 
the Last Judgment, and with special reference to 
the text, " These shall go away into everlasting 
punishment, but the righteous into life eternal," 
I made certain statements which I have been asked 
to repeat, or at any rate to restate in simpler form. 
This I willingly do, for the truth then declared is 
one which, of all others, needs clear and unhesitat- 
ing statement in an age like the present. 

You remember that I told you on that occasion 
that the word " everlasting " is the word which 
in the same sentence is translated "eternal." They 
ought not to be two words, for they are only 
one. Neither is " everlasting " the best translation 
of the term. It should be " eternal " in both cases. 
The word eternal signifies a something which is 
not explained by the English word everlasting. It 
is not something which begins after death, but 
that which we are living now. This is eternity 
Eternity is that which is, as opposed to that which 
seems. Eternal life, to quote the words of our 



152 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

Lord Himself, is to know God. Eternal punishment 
therefore, if we are to use the word punishment at 
all, is the opposite of this. It is the result of the 
deliberate putting away from ourselves of the life 
that ought to be lived with God. If there be a 
man here seeking God, and who yet feels he has 
not found Him, he whose search is sincere, humble, 
and true, that man has found Him. " Thou wouldst 
not seek Me if thou hadst not already found Me." 
But if there be a man here who once stood near to 
God and felt the joy of serving Him, whose life, 
though narrow in range, was wide in opportunity 
and grand in experience, and has forfeited all this 
by the deliberate choice of what was mean and base 
and selfish and worldly, that man is undergoing 
eternal punishment now, for he has chosen the 
seeming in opposition to the real, he has deliberately 
thrust from him that life which in heaven he would 
have enjoyed in greater fulness, but not in different 
kind from the life which he might live now, the life 
of God. 

Life eternal is to know God. That man has 
invoked his own punishment who from his life 
has thrust God away. As this does not seem to have 
been perfectly understood last time I taught it, I 
take another of our Lord's solemn sayings on the 
same subject as my text to-night. It is even more 
solemn than the parable which is usually described 
as the parable of the Last Judgment. The words 
in the ninth of St Mark are terrible. Take them 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 153 

literally, take them symbolically, take them as you 
will, they are full of solemn warning, even of some- 
thing more than warning, of menace against the man 
who chooses a way of his own. There has been 
much unintelligent comment upon this chapter, and 
especially upon this portion of it. It can hardly be 
necessary to say that Jesus was actually quoting in 
the use of these words. You will find the 
original, or part of them at any rate, in the last 
verse of the sixty-sixth chapter of Isaiah. Our 
Lord knew the Old Testament, whatever we do. 
Here is the prophet's description of the chastise- 
ments overtaking the evil-doers of his day, a puri- 
fication stern in its method, beneficent in its effect. 
"It shall come to pass, that from one new moon to 
another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all 
flesh come to worship before Me, saith the Lord. 
And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases 
of the men that have transgressed against Me : for 
their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be 
quenched ; and they shall be an abhorring unto all 
flesh." The simple men whom our Lord addressed 
knew where that figure of the undying worm came 
from and the unquenchable fire, and they were 
standing near to the historic spot thus described in 
the words of the prophet, where criminals were 
done to death, where Israel had been purified by 
the edge of the sword, where worms were busy 
upon the putrefying corpses, where the fire was lit 
to carry the stench away. Our Lord made instant 



154 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

use of the figure thus supplied, and Himself applied 
it to the moral life, the life that we have to live 
now, and He said not one word about the life 
beyond the grave. Speaking, not of death, but of 
life, He means, "Let nothing stand between you 
and right, no suffering, no sacrifice, for destruction 
waits upon every form of wrong, and pain follows 
upon every act of sin." 

Now, to relate this text to the common belief 
and experience, perhaps the best way in which to 
put this relation will be to restate in your hearing 
that which you already know perfectly, the creed 
of popular theology concerning the great facts of 
life and sin and redemption with which we are all 
familiar. It may be put thus — I mean the theology 
that is just passing away, sometimes miscalled the 
old theology, but in reality a very new theology, it 
is only of yesterday, and like yesterday it is dead 
or dying — We are all sinners and deserve to go to 
hell. The hell that is meant is usually a place 
of torment, torment unending on the other side of 
death, a hell which you will never see until the 
angel of death summons you. We are all sinners, 
says this popular creed, but God has provided a 
victim to endure an equivalent of what we have 
deserved. Jesus died upon the Cross, therefore we 
need not suffer. He died in time, the agony was 
only for a few hours, but that which He did effect 
was a deliverance which will only begin when we 
touch eternity, deliverance from the consequences 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 155 

of sin; though we may feel, as a corollary to this 
belief, that forgiveness is ours now, we may thank 
God and receive it. 

It is true that this doctrine has been held with 
qualifications. I leave out any reference, for in- 
stance, to the doctrine of election, by which some 
are supposed to have been predestined to ever- 
lasting bliss, taking effect at the same moment, on 
the other side of death, and some to eternal woe, 
eternal meaning everlasting. We omit also re- 
ference to Antinomianism, by which it was held 
that those who were of Christ, those who had 
availed themselves of this mighty work of His need 
not trouble about righteousness of life. All their 
guilt had been transferred to Him, not only the 
past and the present, but the future too, and they 
need not trouble themselves about living any too 
well. 

But the popular qualifications are these — First, 
the impenitent are not held to be included. Prac- 
tically Christ did not die for all the world ; He only 
died for those who lay hold upon His atonement, 
the rest are left out of account. Secondly, even 
the penitent, however, must put on holiness, or he 
may forfeit that which Christ has effected for him. 
There was a great deal of truth lying beneath all 
this I have stated thus crudely because it is held 
crudely. I am not here to sneer at it, because down 
at the bottom of this statement of truth there was 
something which we must never let go, for if we 



156 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

do, we do it at our peril. But as a matter of fact, 
men have ceased or are ceasing to believe it. I 
question if more than a few in this great congre- 
gation believe it just as I have stated it. The pulpit 
is becoming increasingly silent about it. It is only 
here and there that you will hear a preacher insist 
upon it in all its vividness — I was going to say its 
rawness. Instead of that preachers will as a rule 
vaguely imply that there is something or other, un- 
comfortable, unwelcome, but well deserved, awaiting 
you upon the other side of death if you do not be- 
lieve and lay hold here upon the facts I have men- 
tioned concerning the redeeming work of Christ. 
But, however vaguely they may state it, I say men 
are not greatly interested in it. If I were to preach 
it to-night with all the emphasis I know, you would 
feel that I was striking a false note. Some of you 
would never come here again, for you would feel 
that the prophet had no message, in fact he was no 
prophet at all ; he was stating what your conscience 
and your better self repudiated. 

Do not be in too great a hurry, however, I will 
show you what it is you really repudiate. We have 
come to think three things about this form of 
doctrine. 

First, that it is immoral to punish anyone else 
for my sin, for your sin. Listen to the word punish. 
It is immoral to punish anyone else for your sin or 
for mine. Moreover, it is impossible. No one has 
ever been punished for anybody else's sin ; only the 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 157 

sinner can be punished. Though at the same time 
we all admit the grand counter-principle running 
through all life ; it is that vicarious suffering, 
voluntarily borne, is grand and noble and divine. 
Many a person has stood in the way of another's 
punishment and taken it himself, but when it fell 
upon him it was no punishment ; it was something 
else, it was glorious. That principle it is the 
highest exemplification of which — no, the root and 
inspiration of it — we discern at Calvary. Vicarious 
punishment and vicarious suffering are as wide as 
the poles apart. 

Secondly, we do not, we cannot get rid of the 
consequences of our sin by the merits of anyone 
else. So much of repentance in these days and all 
days is repentance of merely what follows the sin, 
and not of the sin itself. We are punished, ex- 
perience tells us so, and we do not have to wait for 
death. Sometimes we try to cheat ourselves that it 
is not so, but it is with a misgiving at the bottom of 
our heart all the time. We know that no act of 
faith, however definite and however strong, saves 
us from bearing the penal consequences of our 
wrong-doing. In the church to-night, it may be, 
there sits a man who contracted a bad habit in his 
youth. He could have stopped it then; he acted 
in defiance of good counsel, of fatherly love and 
motherly devotion. He braved their prayers, he 
mocked their faith. Now, if that man had to go 
back and begin again, what do you think he would 



158 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

do with his life ? Let the devil at his elbow tell you. 
He has put himself in the hands of a something 
which is now stronger than he. It has laid its 
clammy, iron grip upon his moral nature. He is a 
slave and a sufferer, and he knows it. Let any 
preacher mock that man by saying, " Come, my friend, 
come to the Cross, confess your sin, there is no hell 
for you," he would say, " Liar ! I am in hell now." 

Thirdly, it is impossible to believe — I am stating 
what you feel, remember — that any sin can deserve 
punishment from everlasting to everlasting. Re- 
reading John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita 
Sua a few days ago I came across a sentence I had 
never noticed before. It was something to this 
effect — It were better for a soul to endure extremest 
torment through endless ages rather than commit 
one venial sin. This John Henry Newman declared 
to be the belief of the Catholic Church. I am not 
quite so sure that it is. If it were, I feel sure your 
conscience and mine would be compelled to re- 
pudiate it ; it puts dishonour upon God. The 
reason why so many of the pulpit appeals fail 
nowadays is because men have come, they hardly 
know how, to protest in the name of some higher 
law against these implications of the older doctrine. 
We do not believe these things, we cannot believe 
them. The man in the street will not be won by 
them. No man, I verily believe, is ever terrified 
by this kind of language about retribution into 
choosing the Kingdom of God. 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 159 

Let me repeat these three things which, though 
we repudiate them, contain a truth, a truth I am 
going to set forth again. First, you feel that it is 
immoral that anybody should be asked to bear your 
punishment. If you are a true man, and your re- 
pentance is genuine, you never ask anyone to take 
your place and take your stripes. Secondly, we 
know we do not get rid of the consequences by 
swallowing this belief or that about the forgiveness 
of sin. The consequences are here, and in some 
cases at any rate, we watch them working out with 
all the inexorableness of fate. Thirdly, we do not 
believe, however stern the consequences of wrong- 
doing may be, that they ought to continue from 
everlasting to everlasting. All retribution misses 
its meaning here and God is dethroned, for I can 
never see any meaning in retribution for any purpose 
except it be in the interests of the sinner. If it 
fall upon him in sharpness it is not for the sake 
of vengeance but for the sake of something higher 
and nobler. 

Now, brethren, observe the serious result of this 
way of thinking of ours. It has weakened moral 
appeal. Good old Christians listening to me to- 
night are trembling for what I will say next, for 
fear one should condone wrong-doing or make any 
man or woman in this place to-night feel that it 
matters little whether they do right or wrong if 
somehow and inevitably things will come agreeable 
at the end; it has weakened the moral appeal; 



160 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

men feel, or some men feel, that they can afford 
to trifle with the moral law. You cannot. Listen 
again to the words of Jesus, "It were better to 
enter into life maimed than having two hands to 
go into the moral Gehenna, into the fire that shall 
never be quenched, where their worm dieth not, 
and the fire is not quenched." There is no sug- 
gestion there of the inevitableness of escape from 
what sin deserves, there is no thought of how little 
it matters to do that which is wrong and to live 
the life which is base. Nay, right is right, and 
wrong is wrong, and each meets with its due sequence 
of reward. I want you to listen to two things here. 
First, death is not of much importance. The 
common soldier is no theologian, the life-boatman 
perhaps could state no article of doctrine with 
clearness and fulness, neither are they particularly 
anxious to count what follows death, and see with 
clearness what awaits them, but these men at the 
call of duty, of high service, of right-doing, will 
lay down their life. In our best moments we are 
all the same. Death does not frighten us if we 
meet it breast forward and along the line of high 
duty. It is not of much importance, and it cancels 
no debt, it only means a new focus, and not a 
new man. Observe that our Lord does not dwell 
upon it in His teaching. You have no warrant in 
the words of Jesus for supposing that death marks 
an epoch either of reward or retribution. It is life 
with which He was concerned, life with which we 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 161 

are all concerned, too, living truly or falsely, rightly 
or wrongly, nobly or basely, and God has written 
His law in men's hearts so that they know it matters 
much to choose the highest and quit the lowest, 
to live nobly rather than ignobly, to seek duty 
rather than pleasure, the good rather than the 
great. Jesus put this into all His teaching — the 
reward and the retribution begin now. 

I brought into the pulpit a copy of " Jane Eyre," 
which probably everyone in the congregation has 
read. I draw your attention to the creed of 
Charlotte Bronte as it appears in one of the early 
pages of this book: — 

" Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity 
or registering wrongs. We are, and must be one and all, burdened 
with faults in this world : but the time will soon come when, I 
trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies ; 
when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous 
frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain — the 
impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the 
Creator to inspire the creature. . . . Surely it will never, on the 
contrary, be suffered to degenerate from man to fiend ? No ; I 
cannot believe that, t hold another creed ... it makes Eternity 
a rest — a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss." 

Now, brethren, while I believe that is God's 
purpose for mankind, I believe it is not quite as 
stated here. 

" As the tree falls, so must it lie ; 
As a man lives, so shall he die." 

Death is only a turning in the road. It is not a 
fresh beginning, it is only a new morning, and when 



1 62 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

you import death, as you do, into your theology, 
you forget that your Master seldom or never did. 

" I sent my Soul through the Invisible, 
Some letter of that After-life to spell : 
And by and by my soul return'd to me, 

And answer'd * I Myself am Heaven and Hell.' " 

The second thing I want you to remember is 
this — every thought reacts upon the thinker, every 
deed upon the doer. The penalty of every sin 
is contained in the sin itself. That penalty begins 
to work out from the moment the sin was conceived. 
The harvest may be long in coming, but it all comes, 
here or hereafter, in this life or in the life beyond, 
or both. This is more terrible than the doctrine 
we have been discussing to-night, because it is 
absolutely and inevitably true. " God is not 
mocked. Whatsoever a man seweth that shall he 
also reap." Every stone flung upward from a 
human hand will come down with precisely the 
same force with which it was hurled. 

" The tissues of the life to be 

We weave with colours all our own, 
And in the field of destiny 
We reap as we have sown." 

Every lie rebounds upon him who speaks it. The 
man who robs a brother finds a brother avenged. 
It is the living God Who is the avenger. The 
same act may be one of self-mutilation or it may be 
the retribution of the Most High. You ruin a 
woman. It may be that upon this side of death, 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 163 

let alone upon the other, the worm that dieth not, 
in the gnawings of remorse, will bring home to 
you the foolishness, the utter madness of the 
sin. 

It is possible that I have stated this truth so 
strongly as to cause in some a certain shrinking 
of heart, in others a certain feeling of protest. 
Somebody will be saying to himself "Alas! for 
the sinner. Is God a mere machine ? Is it all 
inexorable justice? Is there no hope in Christ? 
Men and brethren, what shall we do ? " Come 
back and think of the old gospel, the same gospel 
that was preached by the apostle. We take our 
stand now by the side of those who heard Jesus 
utter the words of our text. Repent — the old, old 
method, the old, old way. Repent, not of the 
consequences, but of the sin. Fear only to sink 
in weakness and shame. 

There are men listening to me to-night who 
can find no way out of a moral entanglement 
in which they have involved themselves, and 
they have little hope. Suppose I speak to a 
young lad thus — You have been tempted this 
week in the shaping of your career to take ad- 
vantage of someone else. You have been tempted 
to stain your soul with a lie. You have been 
tempted to thrust down another that you might 
claim what the world calls success. You have been 
tempted to turn your back upon your father's 
principles, tempted to do something foul and base 



164 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

and wrong, in the hope of a profit that is to come 
by and by. You defend yourself thus — " If I do 
not, the gate will not open ; if I do not, life will 
press hardly upon me. I feel myself full of 
ambition, full of the stirrings of a new-found power. 
I want a chance to live. I can atone for all this by 
and by. Only a little sin at the outset of life, and 
afterwards, oh ! what there might be in fulness and 
richness and gladness. I might be a power for 
good." Cut it off! It means death. Out with 
it ! Do not dally for an instant with excuses. 
Have done with it ! I will tell you of someone who 
went through this temptation before you. His 
name was Jesus, and He was the author of the 
words of our text. He faced it in the wilderness. 
The bending of the knee to Satan, and to-morrow 
the throne of the Caesars, oh ! the power for good 
that that might mean ! And the answer was, " Get 
thee hence!" A small life rather than a great, if 
it must be, the cross rather than the throne! "It 
is better to enter into life maimed than having two 
hands to go into the Gehenna of fire." The Jesus 
Who went through the conflict chose the self- 
mutilation and the lonely life and the crown of 
thorns and the betrayal and the agony and the 
shame and the death because He knew it was not 
death. Enter into life maimed, for it is life eternal 
now. It is choosing God and knowing God. And, 
my young brother, the day will come when you 
would give all you possess to have the chance again. 



THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 165 

No sin was ever sinned yet that was worth while. 
The evil comes home to roost, and, however long it 
takes for the effect to work out, it comes, it comes 
on, and it has not done coming when death comes, 
perhaps it is only beginning. The man who chooses 
the lower level instead of the higher finds out his 
blunder, and, oh, what a sad and terrible disenchant- 
ment. Do you not feel that this is eternally true ? 

There was a powerful book published some time 
ago, " The Silence of Dean Maitland." It was a 
parable of the life of every man who deliberately 
chooses the way of the sinner. It began in little 
things, little things for which excuse was made. 
Then it led to greater things, then to a life lie, a 
lie that was told by silence. All through that man's 
life of outwardly glorious success the worm was 
gnawing at his heart. There was no panacea for 
remorse. The fire was not quenched. And at last 
the hand had to come off and the eye to come out, 
and public confession was made and justice was 
vindicated and right was done. It is not only in the 
case of Dean Maitland appearing on the pages of 
fiction that this is so. It is always so. There is 
no escape from it. Either at the beginning or at 
the end the sacrifice has to be made. The cheaper 
and the better, as well as the nobler, is in the 
wilderness, facing the adversary at the beginning of 
the life work. Repentance is cutting off that you 
may enter in. It is life eternal here and now. 

I also brought into the pulpit another book from 



1 66 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

which I intended to quote to you to-night, Ruskin's 
" Crown of Wild Olive." It seems strange to me 
that this generation is already, as it were, beginning 
to forget one of the greatest prophets God ever 
gave to them, John Ruskin. I am about to quote 
from his essay on War, which was delivered as an 
address to the students of a military college. 

" In general, I have no patience with people who talk of * the 
thoughtlessness of youth' indulgently. I had infinitely rather 
hear of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due to that. 
When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way be 
materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with 
his fate, if he will ; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of 
thought, at the very time when every crisis of future fortune hangs 
on your decisions ? A youth thoughtless ! when all the happiness 
of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an 
hour ! A youth thoughtless ! when the career of all his days 
depends on the opportunity of a moment ! A youth thoughtless ! 
when his every act is as a torch to the laid train of future conduct, 
and every imagination a fountain of life or death ! Be thoughtless 
in any after years, rather than now — though, indeed, there is only 
one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless — his death-bed. 
No thinking should ever be left to be done there" 

This is true teaching! These are the words of 
eternal life, they are the echo of the teaching of 
Him who uttered the text we have had in our 
minds and before our eyes this night. 

This is the spirit of Jesus that speaks. Repent- 
ance — repentance brings every man back to the 
feet of the Christ whether he knows it or not. 
You never yet were sorry for sin, but you were 






THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 167 

standing in the presence of the Crucified. You 
never turned your back upon a wrong but what 
you had something to do with the Christ. How 
much can Christ do for you? Everything! You 
leave the future to Him. If any man here has 
been thinking wrong and thinking lightly about it 
and thrusting from him the thought of to-morrow or 
that far off, shadowy future, where his evil may 
be buried in oblivion for ever, let him make no mis- 
take about it. Halt just where you are and turn 
back upon that road and go back to the height 
from which you have come down. The only place 
of safety is here. The further on, the deeper 
doom. 

It may cost something. What does that matter ? 
There is only one thing you have to think about at 
this time, that is, get rid of everything that is base 
and unholy and impure ! Down with it ! Let the 
Christ be glorified in your life. For already the 
hand of that same Christ is at work here, and all 
that needs to be done to rescue you from the grip 
of the adversary He will do. He can remit all the 
consequences of evil if He pleases. He hath suffered 
for the sin of the world. But you must not make 
terms with Him. What you must do is to cut off 
the hand if it be necessary, lop off the foot, pluck 
out the eye. But be right with God rather than 
wrong with the dominion of the whole world. 
And if you do, the day will come, perhaps it will 
not be so very far distant, when you will hear 



1 68 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

the same Jesus speak again, and this is what He will 
say: — 

" Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the 
Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of 
the world." 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 



The following sermon was preached because of a confession made 
to me of mistaken loyalty on the part of one or two people, 
resulting in what amounted to a deliberate breach of the law of 
God. It suddenly struck me that beneath those unhappy histories 
there was something in its essence good and noble, and which 
might be turned to high account. The woman who shielded her 
husband in his continued practice of cheating someone else, and 
the man who was prepared to give up church and Christ and 
splendid usefulness for the sake of a fashionable, worldly young 
woman, whom he could obtain on no other terms, were here 
described. To particularise too plainly might have caused offence, 
so the lesson of the highest self-offering was pointed out through 
other lives, 



X 



" And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his 
son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, 
Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thy 
hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him : For now I know 
that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only 
son, from me." — Genesis xxii. 10, u, 12. 

Here is an instructive, and, rightly understood, an 
inspiring incident, and yet it is one to which justice 
has seldom been done. Much has been spoken and 
written concerning it, but the commentators have 
often wandered sadly from the point. Even King 
James's translators appear to have misunderstood or 
only partially comprehended the significance of it. 
The title they give to the chapter is " Abraham 
tempted to offer Isaac." " He giveth proof of his 
faith and obedience." Apparently those seventeenth 
century scholars considered that the chapter should 
be thought of as the trial of Abraham's faith. I 
would rather call it the raising or the purifying of 
Abraham's faith. They would almost give us the 
idea that God needed to discover something about 
Abraham. The truth is, this chapter teaches us 
that Abraham had to discover something about God. 
God did not tempt Abraham to any deed of violence. 
Instead of that He raised the faith of Abraham and 

«7* 



172 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

the service and even the character of Abraham to a 
higher level than they had ever occupied before. 

Modern biblical criticism, or some part of it, has 
gone to quite the other extreme. I need hardly tell 
this congregation that there are biblical scholars who 
believe and teach that Abraham was a myth, that 
this story is a legend, that it may have ethical value, 
and so on, but we must not look upon it as literal 
history. Well, frankly, it matters not to me if it 
were so, because it is true of some servant of God in 
every generation, and the offering of Isaac is repeated 
and consummated perhaps every day in the year in 
this very land of ours. But for all that I think it is 
historically true, and true just as it stands. And I 
think so on the ground of what we may regard as 
internal criticism. Let us try to put ourselves 
sympathetically in the place of this man who offered 
his beloved in reality to God, whether he sacrificed 
him or no. 

Abraham was little better than an Arab sheik, 
brought up amidst surroundings as widely different 
from yours or mine as it is possible to suppose. 
Yet he had the same moral problems to meet, the 
same decisions to give, the same God to serve. He 
was so far different from those in the midst of whom 
he lived that he could not bring himself to believe 
in a god who was worshipped by sensuality and by 
shame, but in a God whose nature was righteous- 
ness. This it is that marks Abraham off from his 
times and entitles him to our respect and to the 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 173 

name of the friend of God. But he had been 
educated, too, within a circle of ideas the influence 
of which he could not escape, any more than you 
and I can escape the intellectual environment of our 
own time. Religion was often a matter of human 
sacrifice, of horror, of terror and of woe. Religion 
has been made such in many generations in the 
history of mankind. We have not to travel very 
far from this spot to find that in a measure it is so 
to-day — a thing of woe and darkness rather than of 
joy and light. 

Abraham, however, having discovered his God 
of righteousness, now proceeds to test himself 
with regard to the validity of all earthly affec- 
tion, and I can imagine, as he feels his pride, 
his fatherly pride in his dear son, growing 
day by day, that the influence of early training 
would sometimes come over him. He would feel 
at the bottom of his heart a certain misgiving as 
to the purity and Tightness of this love. " Ought 
I to care so much for my boy ? Am I keeping 
back from God something that ought to be His? 
Am I, in fact, worshipping another god than the 
God I have found ? Is Isaac mine or His ? Would 
it be a sublime thing, in fact, does God want it — 
that I offer my boy, as my father and my father's 
father have offered their boys to their gods ? " 
Then the moment comes, the resolution is taken, 
he sets out upon his journey, and the lad who is 
to be his victim accompanies him, unquestioning, 



174 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

for Isaac had a part in this event. And still think- 
ing and still troubling over the question, they arrive 
at the mount of sacrifice. Abraham binds him who 
is dearer than life itself to the old man, lays him on 
the altar, and prepares for the last dread blow. 
But he cannot deliver it. As he looks at his victim 
who has so often lain in his arms he lifts the knife, 
but puts it down again. Can he strike? His re- 
ligion and the ideas of worship in which he was 
trained tell him to deal the blow and get it over. 
Something else cries, "Hold! lay not thine hand 
upon the lad." This was a moral crisis and a 
terrible crisis, too, for Abraham ; and it is because 
of the vividness with which it is pictured here that 
I venture to think, critic or no critic, it took place. 
He looks at his lad, he looks at his knife, and then 
the highest prevails. It was as though an angel 
spoke to him, for God did speak in the mind 
of this heroic, single-minded servant, who with 
a very dim light shining in his soul chose to serve 
at his best. He let the knife fall, and, clasping 
his hands, lifted his face to heaven and spoke thus 
— these words ought to be put into his mouth 
rather than into the mouth of the angel — " My 
God, I shall not lay my hand upon the lad, Thy 
gift to me. I shall not do anything to him save 
love him as I did before. For Thou knowest that 
I fear Thee. Were there anything grand and 
good for which to give my child, Thou shouldst 
have him. I would not withhold my son, mine 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 175 

only son, from Thee. It is not blood wherewith 
I serve Thee, but love, and if love called for 
blood it should be given, but Thou hast not called 
for blood this day." Thus the voice of the angel 
spoke in Abraham's own heart. 

Abraham's highest self-offering was made when 
he was ready to give, if occasion demanded, if 
anything high and noble and true called for it, 
the life of his son, his own life of lives. " He 
hath showed thee, O man, what is good, and 
what doth the Lord require of thee but to deal 
justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with 
Him?" 

From this incident, in all probability, sprang the 
higher religion which marks off Israel from the 
kindred peoples from which Israel came. If 
Abraham had not seen at the altar that human 
sacrifice, as such, did not please God, but the 
highest sacrifice of all, which would allow nothing 
to stand between the soul and righteousness, 
there would have been no chosen people. Israel 
would never have been born but for Abraham's per- 
ception of this great spiritual truth. And some- 
thing more is shown to us in this very chapter, which 
I think the commentators have missed — " Jehovah 
Jireh" — " The Lord will provide " is the translation. 
Better still, "The Lord will see." The Lord Who 
searches the heart knows what Abraham would do if 
righteousness needed, knows what he would give if 
love of truth commanded. There is no barrier between 



176 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

earthly love and heavenly love. " The Lord will see/' 
as the Lord hath seen. Here was the highest self- 
offering of which the soul was capable. He was 
offering that which was dearer to him than life itself. 

The principle herein declared, the situation herein 
described, has repeated itself in human history a 
thousand times since that far-off day — a thousand 
times? — may be a thousand thousand times. It 
teaches us this— God requires no meaningless sacri- 
fice from any man. I said, no meaningless sacri- 
fice, but there are occasions in life when earthly 
affection has to be sacrificed to eternal truth, when a 
lower love has to be offered up in the name of a 
higher. Well is it for him who can discern the 
occasion when it comes. 

To illustrate what I am here teaching, let me refer 
you to two incidents, which I think separately I have 
mentioned to you before. One I take from Professor 
Lecky's u History of European Morals." In his 
account of mediaeval monasticism, Mr Lecky gives an 
illustration, told in the monastic chronicles them- 
selves, to this effect. A father, weary of the world 
and the world's ideals, one day appears at the gate of 
a monastery, leading by the hand his little son. You 
will be wise enough and large-minded enough to say 
along with me that, in that grim and barbarous time, 
a monastery represented the nearest approach to the 
Christian ideal that was to be found. This man 
wanted to flee the world and all its tumults, all its 
rewards likewise, and chose instead the service of 






THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 177 

God as he saw it. He was received at the monas- 
tery gate, but on condition that he submitted himself 
to every test of his sincerity. These men were 
grimly in earnest, indeed, who lived within the 
cloistered walls. They took his little boy away from 
him, clothed him in rags, beat and tortured him in 
the presence of the father, starved him whilst the 
company ate — could the father eat, I wonder ? Day 
after day and week after week went by, the child 
growing thinner and thinner and sadder and sadder. 
The father steeled his heart, believing that this was 
the service of the living God. He was saving his own 
soul by crucifying his flesh and blood, by trampling, 
as he was being taught, on earthly affection. The 
hour came when the supreme test was applied. The 
abbot bade him take his child in his arms, carry him 
to the river that ran past the monastery, and fling 
him in. The father obeyed without question. Poor 
child, I wonder what he thought as he lay in these 
callous arms. But at the moment when the deed 
was to be done the abbot's hand stayed the man, as 
the voice of the angel had stayed Abraham. " Now 
we know," was the verdict, "your sincerity. Now 
we are aware that nothing will stand between you 
and Christ. Your soul is saved, come back, spare 
your child." 

Before I comment upon this incident, let me place 
another beside it ; then perhaps but little comment 
will be needed. I have here what is to me a very 
precious book, an old edition of Bunyan's " Pilgrim's 

M 



178 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

Progress," in which there is a memoir of the author, 
that great preacher and saint, one of the noblest 
vindicators of the form of religion under which 
you and I worship to-day. John Bunyan went to 
prison for his faith, in a day when it meant much 
to suffer, and he endured within those prison 
walls some things which were harder than death. 
He was brought before his judges, and was told, 
so he tells it in his own words, "Hear your judg- 
ment. You must be taken back again to the prison, 
there to lie during the king's pleasure. If you 
do not submit to go to Church and hear divine 
service and leave your preaching, you must be 
banished this realm, and after that if you shall be 
found in this realm without special licence from the 
king you must hang by the neck till you are dead. 
And so," said Bunyan, " he bade my gaoler have 
me away." The hero answered thus — " I am at a 
point with you. If I were out of prison to-day I 
would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the 
help of God." If the narrative stopped even there 
it would be inspiring. We should feel that was 
a true man, and a brave and a humble. He made 
no oration. His speech was a good deal shorter than 
his judges', but nothing more needed to be said. 
But now there came the parting from his wife and 
children, and in his own vivid phraseology it is 
thus described. " Oh, the thought of the hardship 
to my poor blind child. I thought it would break 
my heart in pieces. It was as the pulling of the 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 179 

flesh from my bones. I saw I was as a man who 
was pulling down his house upon the heads of his 
wife and children." I think I can quote the rest 
myself. Speaking of the poor blind child who came 
day by day to the prison to take away the little 
work by which Bunyan was able to support them 
all in some degree, he said, " Poor child ! how hard 
it is like to go with thee in this world. Thou must 
be beaten, must suffer hunger, cold, and nakedness, 
and yet I cannot endure that even the wind should 
blow upon thee." Do we not feel, you and I, that 
in this speech there was something almost tragical ? 
Here was a man to whom the stake would have 
meant nothing, a man who could have faced torture 
and shame and death with equanimity. He was 
putting on the altar that day what was dearer to 
him than a thousand lives. His blind child, his wife, 
his other dear ones, were offered to the service 
of the Most High and for love of Jesus Christ. 

Now we will take our mediaeval saint again. The 
two incidents look very much alike. Are they? 
They are infinitely apart. The one is squalid, the 
other is sublime. The would-be saint's offering was 
fanaticism born of selfishness. He was saving his 
soul at the cost of his child. Bunyan's was the 
supreme st form of self-sacrifice of which he was 
capable. 

These two men take us back to Abraham and 
that altar on the top of Mount Moriah. Abraham 
might have been like the mediaeval saint, and he 



180 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

might have struck his blow, but something higher 
stayed his hand, and that something higher was the 
spirit that controlled Bunyan ; the prayer which is 
here put into the mouth of the angel, was a sort of 
hymn of praise to the God Whom he had discovered, 
Who asks for the highest, not the lowest, Who will 
be content with nothing less. He was prepared for 
sacrifice if love and honour and duty and heroism 
called for it. But they did not call, so the lad was 
spared. The particular had given way to the uni- 
versal, the temporal had given way to the eternal. 
The question most men have to face some time or 
other is — What shall we do when the highest form 
of giving is asked for, the yielding of love in the 
name of righteousness? Abraham's answer you 
have, Bunyan's only expresses it a little more 
vividly. We know, then, what God requires of 
us. 

Now, brethren, to bring the matter still more 
plainly home to our consciousness, let me adduce 
modern experience. To-day is yours and mine. It 
is but a year or two since England was stirred at 
the news that Lord Roberts had been commanded 
to go to the front and direct the movements of the 
British troops in South Africa. In a dark hour of 
the history of his country he went — it was a darker 
hour in his own. His boy had fallen on the field 
of Colenso, and I who speak to you to-night went 
to see the spot where he fell, and stood on it, and 
thought what I am now telling you. We were all 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 181 

greatly moved with admiration when the veteran, 
without a word about his own sorrow, went bravely 
to the front at the call of duty. He was serving 
his country, not counting the cost, and it does not 
matter to us at the moment whether the service in 
which he was engaged was (so far as the policy is 
concerned) right or wrong. He was right to go. 
The sympathetic fibre in our hearts is touched for 
this reason — that man if he had had another son, 
would have laid him down if England had wanted 
him. Now England called for the father himself. 
Would he have given more gladly his life or his 
boy ? The question need not be answered. Lord 
Roberts gave his son and gave himself, he gave 
himself in his son before he ever saw South 
Africa. 

Well, now, I have instanced a man in high station. 
I am going to tell you about another whom you 
do not know, and perhaps only two people in this 
congregation do know. A man who never had 
more than thirty shillings a week in his life, but 
he did as much as, or more, than Lord Roberts. 
He stood exactly in the position in which Abraham 
stood on Mount Moriah. A working man in D 1 
Brighton, a man of sterling character and moral 
worth, of delicate health, who had known struggle 
all his days, but who, unlike so many of his fellows, 
fears God and keeps His commandments, gave this 
as the explanation of his conduct in an hour of 
confidence to me. He said, " I was the son of a 



1 82 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

man who had still less in his best days than I have 
ever had to spend. I was brought up in a poor 
home, all the poorer for the incident that made me 
what I hope I am." His father had been turned 
away from his work because he could and would 
not do a mean and shabby and wicked thing. 
He would not lie away his manhood, and he 
would not cheat another man's rights out of 
existence. The alternative was presented to him, 
" Comply or you go." He thought about his 
wife and children, laid them on the altar of duty, 
and went. "And," says my friend (for I am 
proud to claim him as a friend), " I was the only 
one of the family old enough to know what it had 
cost my father. He did not tell me, it was my 
mother. As she cut the last loaf for the children 
her tears were falling fast over the bread, and I 
questioned her to know why. She took me aside 
and explained, and I have never forgotten how my 
heart swelled and my bosom throbbed as in sympathy 
I took my stand with my father. She said, ' He is 
a true man, he has done right. We must praise 
God, we must trust Him for our bread.' " He 
continued, u They were hard times and anxious. 
We came through at last, but in a manner of 
speaking we never got back where my father volun- 
tarily stepped from. But, oh, don't I love and 
revere his memory ! All that is good in me to-day 
I feel I owe to that man's influence and example. 
He was a father of whom to be proud, a man of God ! " 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 183 

Brethren, there are so few of these fathers in 
this England of ours to-day that some of us are 
beginning to wonder whether her glory is over. 
You would not have to ask the question if you 
could multiply that man by a hundred thousand. 
The destiny of our nation would be safe. 

It was Abraham's principle again. God asked 
for something, not that He did not know what His 
servant would do, but His servant had to know it, 
like Abraham as he stood at the altar counting the 
cost. His decision was this : — 

" Because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." 

So on the altar, like Bunyan, he put his wife and 
babes, came out a hero and a conqueror for the 
living God. 

You and I may have to be confronted with this 
very question in some other form. I think this 
man of the Bible did not solve it any more truly 
than the working man at Brighton, and we read the 
Bible wrong and mistake its significance if we think 
Abraham had any greater help to rescue him or any 
severer tests to pass through or any deeper spiritual 
questions to solve than you or I. Abraham's God is my 
God, your God, the God of my Brighton friend, and 
it is his question we have to solve in another form. 
May we never mistake its meaning. Sometimes you 
may stumble into the blunder of Mr Lecky's 
mediaeval saint, or you may rise to the height of 
Bunyan and the Brighton working man. Which 



1 84 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

shall it be? I have heard people say things like 
this, " God knows I loved that lad too much, so He 
took him away. He left me lonely and left me sad, 
but then I ought not to have loved anyone in 
excess." Or I have heard the word of warning: 
"Mother, father, do not adore that child as you do. 
Do not pour your affection upon him without reserve 
as you are in danger of doing. Oh, be careful, be- 
cause he may be taken from you. You may be 
loving him too much." Beloved, that is a lie ! We 
never love anyone too much. God never asks from 
any man anything approaching to the sacrifice of 
noble affection. I am aware that there is something 
here that savours of the sacrifice that Bunyan made 
and that Abraham was willing to make, but the 
form in which the question is put savours more of 
Abraham's decision on the sacrificial morning. We 
never love too much, we only love too little. God 
is not a jealous God in that sense, that you are to 
take your child out of His way because He will be 
first. The prophet saw clearer who said, "If a man 
love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God Whom he hath not seen?" But there 
is a love for which men and women will sin. The 
wife will lie for the husband, mothers will do wrong 
for their children, fathers will sin for home, friend 
will sacrifice to the devil for friend. Know, then, 
that in every case where such decision is taken you 
have sacrificed husband, wife, child, self, to the 
lower, and not to the higher. The highest love is 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 185 

the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, and by 
that I mean the love of Christ which never spared, 
never will spare those whom He calls. He will have 
the highest, and the highest self-offering may mean, 
often does mean, Calvary. I wonder what the 
mother of Jesus thought when she saw Him hanging, 
agonising, dying, upon the cross. He did not spare 
her, because His Father had not given Him the 
word to come down from the cross. He hung there, 
and she suffered in Him. I wonder what Peter 
thought when he learned what it meant to follow 
the Nazarene after all. He had denied Him to save 
his own life, afraid of the lash in Pilate's hall when 
he saw it lacerating his Master's back — poor timid 
Galilean, afraid, yet loving all the time. But when 
the awful crisis was past and he met his Master 
again and sobbed out his shame and his sorrow, there 
was a new Peter. What did life mean now ? Jesus 
promised no bed of roses, no fine time in this world, 
but He promised him a reward of which the world 
could not rob him, and I think I would rather have 
been Peter than Pilate a thousand times. Pilate had 
his chance and lost it, Peter had his again and took 
it. He went to stripes, imprisonment, contumely, 
shame, the cross — the actual wooden cross, upon 
which Peter died for His Master. That is the love 
of Christ, which passeth knowledge, for where is 
Peter to-day ? Nearer, perhaps, than you and I think. 
Heaven might press through this wall of film, and 
show us how things really are. What is death? 



1 86 THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 

Nothing. Life is everything. " Fear not them that 
kill the body and after that have no more that they 
can do." But fear surrender to the base, fear to 
trifle with noble love, fear to stain with mud and 
dirt the affection which God has given you. Give 
all to Him. Consecrate all earth's affection at the 
altar, and if from the altar you must go to Calvary, 
then go ! Love's highest is called for, the worthiest, 
the only one which you can offer in the presence 
of the Lamb of God. If you give it, you shall 
find your soul again, higher, purer, in the glory land. 
For in heaven all that you have ever loved that was 
worth loving, in heaven all that you have ever served 
that was worth serving, is in the keeping of the 
Lord Jesus. That Friend who never failed a friend 
has in reserve for you everything you have offered 
Him. Oh, if men knew what a blunder sin is, if 
they knew how little it was worth while to trifle 
with the opportunity that God gives, no altar would 
be set up by the hand divine on which we would 
be unwilling to place ourselves or lay the nearest 
and the dearest if God and the kingdom of heaven 
required it. 

Let nothing stand between you and God and 
truth and right. The highest service you can 
render to a dear one is to love him too much to 
sin for him. 

If any affection asks you to be disloyal to God 
and right and truth, nail it on the cross. It is 
your best course with what God has given you. 



THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING 187 

Here, it may be, I am coming closer to your ex- 
perience. How do I know but that I am speaking 
to some person who is tempted for love's sake to 
compromise with what you know to be good ? 
Never do it. Never stand for a moment in the 
presence of the adversary of your souls. Away 
with everything that hinders your approach to God. 
There may be those here who have known home 
tragedies too dreadful to be named in the public 
place. You perhaps know, mother, father, what 
David felt when in the line of his duty he sent 
an army against his son. You know that cry of 
agony that was wrung from his royal heart, " O, 
Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom! would God 
I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " 
My friend, if there be any temptation upon your 
road which means surrender to a false love, I 
beseech you to have done with it. God will take 
you through, prepare Himself a lamb for the burnt 
offering. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? 
Stern and even terrible sometimes is the love of 
God, but it never fails the loved. Hold on to it, 
and it will save you. Hear the words of one who 
gave all that man could give to the service of the 
living God: U I am persuaded that neither death, 
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord." 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 



There is a pathetic story attaching to the sermon which bears this 
title. I had in mind a good man whose quiet work in London 
many people have reason to thank God for, but who in his time 
has sinned and suffered deeply. There are few men for whom I 
have a greater respect, but not until lately have I been able to 
persuade him to put an end to his mournful habit of retrospection. 
He has allowed the consequences of one sad mistake to cloud the 
whole of his spiritual life. What he is principally slow to see is 
that self-reproach carried to excess is a form of unfaith. A full 
salvation is inconsistent with longing and regret for a day that is 
dead. Too great a readiness to turn one's back upon the past is a 
mark of shallowness, but the opposite is a kind of spiritual sombre- 
ness. There are many who fall into both errors. 



XI 



"And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink of the 
water of the well of Beth-lehem, which is by the gatel " — 2 Sam. xxiii. 
15- 

There are some characters in song and story which 
have the power of impressing posterity with some- 
thing of the charm felt in their presence by their 
contemporaries. It is not always easy to say just 
why. For instance, a book just issued gives us yet 
one more study added to the numerous and appar- 
ently never-ending series of studies of the character 
and career of Mary Queen of Scots. Even to 
English people, Mary Queen of Scots is always 
profoundly interesting. Can you tell me why? 
Some would say, a Yes, because such a mystery 
surrounds her career." That is not all : mystery 
surrounds many other people, but we are not all 
interested in solving it. The fact is there is some- 
thing distinctly human about the character of Mary 
Queen of Scots. There is something in her which 
vibrates in the great heart of humanity the wide 
world over. That is why, with all her sin and 
sorrow, we feel her to be so truly typical of the 
experiences which are repeating themselves in every 
century and generation. 

Such a character again is that of Alexander the 

191 



1 92 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

Great. His soldiers would have died for him 
willingly ; they asked no greater honour, no higher 
ideal, than to perish in the sight of Alexander, 
doing his bidding, winning his battles. As we look 
back we can hardly understand why ; yet Alexander 
lives for us as he lived for them : we feel him to be 
a real personality. Amid all the shadowy figures of 
history a man like this stands right out. Why is 
it ? Why, in spite of his sensational ambition, there 
was something wonderfully human, rich, and deep 
in the character of Alexander. Closer to our own 
history and experience, perhaps, we come when we 
name King Alfred. Little is known about Alfred 
that is authentic ; his name and work come down 
to us through the mists of legend. We cannot see 
distinctly the face of the great Saxon king, but he 
has cast a spell over us as he has cast a spell over 
many Englishmen since his own day. Why is it? 
This time because, however apocryphal the stories 
may be which are told about him, we feel the spell 
of personal goodness : it is a real man and a true 
that looks out upon us from that far century. Such 
a character again is Queen Elizabeth. Never was a 
British sovereign served by a nobler or greater band 
of men than stood around the throne of the maiden 
queen. There are flaws in that great character. 
A woman truly on some sides of her nature, she 
seemed to be a wild beast on others. The very 
men who served her best were by her lightly and 
easily forgotten. Yet Cromwell said — and we echo 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 193 

Cromwell's words, looking back as he looked — 
" Queen Elizabeth of famous memory. We need not 
be ashamed to call her so." To a Scottish audience 
I would adduce as a similar figure in history, loom- 
ing large and clear, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Of all 
the beautiful songs ever written or sung north of 
the Tweed, none excel those that have been com- 
posed concerning the personality of Prince Charles. 
Was he good ? 1 am afraid I cannot say as much 
as that. How he falsified the promises of youth, 
this man who spent his days in lust and debauchery, 
and filled a drunkard's grave at last ! Yet every 
person who reads his biography is touched by it, 
and feels a certain thrill of sympathy for Bonnie 
Prince Charlie and for his fate. Something clings 
to his personality that redeems him, in spite of his 
faults, and we can hardly say just what it is. 

I have named a long series : we feel as if we 
have personal acquaintance with each of them. 
We cannot say just why it is they stand out, except 
it was that they are typical of humanity, as a whole, 
in its sins and sorrows, good and evil, joy and pain. 
They sounded the depths, they rose to the heights. 
Humanity vibrates in sympathy with such careers. 
Distinctively such was King David. I have purposely 
named these great ones of antiquity one by one, 
because I thought you might like to hear why it is 
that we feel that had we to place them in sequence 
we might place this Old Testament character first. 
Everybody feels that he knows King David. I 

N 



194 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

always feel as if I could recognise him in the street. 
We are not afraid of him at all ; we are not awed 
by his majesty. We feel a certain sympathy and 
kinship with his character. Why is it ? Just for 
the same reason as those whom I have already 
named come home to us. It is because of some- 
thing distinctively human, real, deep, and true in 
the nature of this Israelitish king. Oh, he sinned 
deeply, he repented agonisingly, he suffered greatly, 
he won grandly. He is described as a man after 
God's own heart ; but that was not because he 
never sinned a sin or never made a mistake. Take 
his life. Here was an adulterer, a man of treachery, 
lust, and evil ; a man who sunk as low as it is 
possible for a man to do T and retain anything to 
which we can give the name of manhood; yet, in 
spite of it all, we feel as if there were something 
generous, noble, child-like, in the nature of King 
David, which showed itself time and again, and 
stamps him truly human. This was the man who 
loved Jonathan, who mourned for Absalom. In 
all history, in all literature, there is no more 
pathetic cry than the cry that went up from that 
bereaved father's heart : "O my son Absalom, my 
son, my son Absalom ! Would God I had died for 
thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " That alone 
would bring us close to the heart of King David, 
but here in this chapter is told a simple incident 
that shows us something like the spell of Alexander 
upon his followers. David had around him mighty 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 195 

men, who loved, worshipped, followed, would have 
laid down their lives for him. One day, toward 
the end of his life, the weary old king, looking 
back upon the scenes of his childhood, murmurs a 
prayer aloud, and the dull ears of the mighty men 
catch it. They speed to gratify his wish; they 
do it at the j eopardy of their lives. It was a grand 
deed. "Oh," cried the king, "that one would 
give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, 
which is by the gate ! " When they had brought 
it, their own blood being the price of it, and placed 
it in his hands, he could not drink it. " Be it far 
from me, O Lord, that I should do this : is not this 
the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of 
their lives ? " Therefore, he would not drink it, 
but poured it out unto the Lord. I say there is 
something dramatic there, something beautifully 
human, something grand on both sides. David 
was no less typically human, standing on his 
pedestal, than were the three mighty men who 
won for him the drink that he said he longed for. 

Do you think they brought David precisely what 
he wanted? No; the mighty men missed seeing 
something that you and I can see now, looking 
back. David was a poet, a seer ; the tongue that 
uttered this prayer was one which, though it may 
not have uttered it for the first time, must have sung 
in the house of God : "The Lord is my Shepherd, 
I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in 
green pastures, He leadeth me beside the waters of 



i 9 6 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

rest." It was David the poet who spoke. The 
weary old man, drawing toward the evening of his 
days, looking back upon the Bethlehem of his youth, 
where he used to keep his father's sheep in the 
fold, and thinking of the long, dreary pilgrimage 
between that day and this, utters, almost in the 
spirit of the Shepherd Psalm, the plaint and the 
prayer, " Oh, that I could go back; oh, that one 
would give me to drink of the water of the well of 
Bethlehem ! " An impossible prayer. The king 
could not be the shepherd boy again ; the innocence 
of his joyous youth was past. But I think I know 
what he felt, and so do you. Recently I went to 
visit a spot where some of my childhood's days were 
spent, and some of the very happiest I have ever 
spent anywhere. I went to look at the old scenes 
that I thought I remembered so well. It was a sad 
vision. The old home was in ruins in the ground ; 
a little way up the road there was a spring well, 
by the side of which I used, as a boy, to play. 
I saw so many changes that I did not even want 
to go and look. But a kind friend took me as 
guide. "Good water, Mr Campbell," he said. 
"I know that," I replied; but I did not drink it. 
David did not want that water, he wanted childhood 
again, and childhood's radiance, sweetness and purity. 
I think I felt just a little as David must have felt. 
The water was no good to him. He could not 
go back ; you and I cannot go back. 

Is there a single person who does not feel some- 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 197 

thing of this in his experience? There may be 
some who do not look back upon their child- 
hood with anything approaching pleasure. I see 
one man whose childhood was one long tragedy. 
Now the Lord has led him to a large place ; 
but for the most of us it is not so. We look 
back for something, we can hardly describe what; 
but something we miss in life as it is. We were 
nearer to heaven, to reality, to sweetness once — 
or so we sometimes feel — than we are to-day. 
Gazing into your faces, I read history in every one 
— moral experience chiselled in. Some of you 
look careworn, tired, unable for the burden of 
life; some as though you are ready to lay it 
down. Others standing up to it, as it were, 
strong, rich, full in your manhood ; but you bear 
the scars, and on every one of you is the hand- 
writing of time, pain, sorrow. Do you never look 
wistfully back, wish you had your opportunities 
again, feel as though you would make a better 
thing of life, with fewer mistakes, fewer things 
to regret if you could only start once more? Do 
you think about the chequered way that you have 
come ? And now with David's experience, you are 
living through your happy childhood, when you 
knew nothing about life as you know it now. 
Some of you never dreamed of being in the City 
Temple this morning, and you wish that everything 
during the last five, ten, or twenty years, which 
has culminated in your being in this place this 



198 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

morning could be blotted out. You were in a 
holier once, or so you feel, when you lisped your 
prayer beside your mother's knee, when you lived 
under the shadow of your father's good name. 
Love came then, and made life richer and fuller; 
sorrow followed it, and made it darker and emptier ; 
sin came, and blackened it. The old home is gone ; 
the old environment, the sweet fleckless experience, 
so heavenly, so pure. " Oh, for a drink of the 
water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the 
gate ! " David longs and says. There are more 
poets than David to say it for us ; and many a 
poet has said it since. One of the greatest of 
our own, reared as it were in our very atmosphere, 
writes thus : — 

" As life wanes, all its strife and care and toil 
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees 
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass 
Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew 
The morning swallows, with their songs like words — 
All these seem clear and only worth our thought." 

Browning and Tennyson changed roles for once — 
it is the latter that strikes the sublimer as well as 
the more familiar note : — 

" Break, break, break, 

On thy cold grey stones, O sea ! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me." 

" Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, O sea ! 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 199 

But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me." 

This is a very natural feeling, and there are many- 
ways of treating it ; here is one — I name it only 
to reject it — the way of Cynicism and Pessimism. 
It is to steel heart and mind against melancholy, 
remorse, and even affectionate regret. You may 
pass a day in comparative quiet if you try not to 
feel, not to realise, not to look back. 

" Ah ! my beloved, fill the cup that clears 
To-day of past regrets and future fears ; 
To-morrow ! — why, to-morrow I may be 
Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years." 

That will not satisfy except for a moment. We 
may all feel ourselves in that mood, but we do not 
stay there. The Persian poet himself did not; 
he knew that there was another and higher way. 
It is this — to realise that true life, the life of 
the soul, never grows old, although it grows up. 
Our true home never is, never was, amid the 
symbols and shadows of time, but in the grand 
reality of eternity. The well of Bethlehem in the 
morning — there is no turning back to it in the after- 
noon. There is a farther, a more glorious morning, 
a deeper, a nobler, a purer draught from the waters of 
God, the waters of rest. The soul in growing older 
is not farther from God than in the days of sweet in- 
nocence. To turn in simplest, most childlike trust to 
God, truth, heaven, wherever you are and however 
you are, is to drink deep of the water of ageless life. 



2oo THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

I have now come to the point where I must go 
to humanity's purest teacher. We shall take our 
stand by the Son of Man, the human Christ, as 
He sits weary on the well of Samaria. Try for 
one moment to do this in reality. Here is Jesus 
treading life's dusty pathway, feeling as you and 
I often feel, knowing, as you and I know life 
with its trials, disappointments, sorrows, failures, 
its beginnings again ; living through it all, never 
defeated by it. Here sits Jesus weary with 
the greatness of the way, like ourselves wanting 
human sympathy, and, as we so often are, re- 
fused. a Give me to drink," pleads the Son of 
Man ; and the answer is dislike, prejudice, ignorance. 
Then the Divine remonstrance comes, " If thou 
knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith 
unto thee, Give Me to drink, thou wouldst have 
asked of Him, and He would have given thee 
living water. Whoso drinketh of this water shall 
thirst again, but whoso drinketh of the water that I 
shall give him shall never thirst. But it shall be in 
him a well of water, springing up unto eternal life." 

This was the water for which David thirsted 
when the poet-king uttered his longing cry for 
the water of the well of Bethlehem, he was 
looking back to the life of the child, but I think 
in his heart was the longing for the life of the 
saint. Can we feel as David must have felt at that 
time? Looking back along the road of life, what 
did he see? There is Shimei, flying, cursing him, 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 201 

and throwing dust upon him as he walks with bowed 
and stricken head. Yonder in the wood hangs the 
body of his dearest loved son, who has lifted his 
hand against his father's throne and his father's life. 
Yonder, again, he sees Israel exulting, he hears the 
shout of his people going up in acclamation when 
the fearless shepherd boy comes from his seclusion 
to strike down Israel's tyrant. A proud moment, 
but David does not want that moment again. Now 
he sees in the hand of the great king, whom it is 
his privilege and duty to soothe, the poised javelin, 
ready to be thrown. Now he is fleeing for his life, 
hunted like a partridge on the hill ; now his arms 
are round about Jonathan. And, again, Jonathan 
dead, Saul gone, David king — strong, unscrupulous, 
guilty, taking Bathsheba to his bosom, Uriah 
gasping his last at the front of the fighting-line, 
slain by the lust and the treachery of him who was 
after God's own heart. Now he seems to see again 
the sombre figure of the prophet of God entering 
into his presence in the midst of his splendour, pomp, 
and triumph — " Thou art the man ! " and the voice 
of conscience re-echoed the voice of the prophet. 
" Oh," thinks the weary old king, drawing near to 
the end, "If I could but go back! Oh, for a drink 
of the water of the well of Bethlehem. Oh, for 
childhood's opportunity ! " That is how some of 
us feel amidst the trivialities, absurdities, shams, 
meanness, violence of life. Are we not weary, 
would we not go back ? But the true and deeper 



202 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

thought is David's own. Would we not go up ? 
Oh, if there be water of life, give me to drink ! 
O Lord with the pierced hand, no mighty man can 
bring me that water, the draught of which means 
that I thirst not again. But there is One who 
fought His battle for me, and brings it to me, the 
crown of thorns upon His head, the mark of the 
lacerating spear in His side. With the pierced hand 
He gives that cup ; Master from Thy hand we take 
it, the water of ageless life. 

If this be true, and my whole life is built on it, 
and my whole task here springs from deepest sincerity 
concerning it, I want you to do something to-day, do 
it now. I address first, it may be, that young man 
who has been in London I know not how long, but 
long enough to learn the ways of sin. There are 
some things he wishes he had never looked upon, some 
words he had better never have heard, some deeds he 
had better never have done. Oh, cursed wisdom! 
Give me back my innocence! Here is another in whom 
the vexations, disappointments, crushing sorrows of 
life have succeeded in dulling the spiritual suscepti- 
bility. Such a one does not look up any more, the 
soul is silent towards God. You are no longer 
capable of high expectation or high enthusiasm. 
Again, look at that man who once was a success 
like King David in his heyday. This man of 
business was once a man of power, of influence, but 
in an evil moment success tempted him to that 
which in his conscience, he knew to be wrong ! he 



THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 203 

has been hurled down from his eminence, and life 
is a tragic failure for him to-day. His heart is full 
of bitterness and self-loathing. Yet for the moment 
he thinks, If I could begin again ! Oh, for a drink of 
the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate 
of manhood ! How different it might be ! Now 
listen to me. You are only a child still, everyone 
of you. You thought you had gone a long way 
from God, and so in experience you did. But the 
Father cared too much for you to allow you to do 
it with impunity. You have paid for your ex- 
perience, sometimes in sharpest discipline, sometimes 
in deepest sorrow. " Shall not the Judge of all 
the earth do right?" Pray your prayer like a 
child ; there is no going back ; God in His mercy 
has closed that door ; the way is up. 

" We have passed age's icy caves 
And manhood's dark and tossing waves, 
And youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray. 
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee 
Of shadow-peopled infancy, 
Through death and birth to a diviner day." 

Permit the paradox — some men by their sin open 
the gateway to saintship. Of course, that is not 
true as it stands, nothing ever is ; but I will illustrate 
it. A dear friend of mine, a minister, speaking 
to me about the life history of one whom I knew 
almost as well as he, told me about a blot in that 
particular career. He said, u I have never known 
a man of greater promise, of greater natural endow- 



2o 4 THIRSTING FOR THE WATER OF LIFE 

merits ; but he sinned one sin which the world will 
not forgive, and it seemed as if the door of useful 
service were slammed in his face. I think he has 
mourned every day of his life since in sackcloth and 
ashes, because of that one delirious moment when he 
sinned the sin which the world will not forgive, but 
perhaps upon which God looks with kinder eye." 
He added that the following question was put to him 
by one of those busybodies who try to keep a raw 
wound open. I loathe the very sight of them, and 
I think I am fairly tolerant ; but there is one type 
of character I cannot endure, and that is the man 
who looks for the worst in his neighbour, keeps 
open the guilty record, and passes on the story, grim 
and dirty though it be. He came to my friend and 
said, " What do you think ? You know So-and-So ? 
Such-and-such happened in that year. I don't think 
you ought to be with him so much. What do you 
think about it?" "I think," was the reply, "that 
when he fell, God, by the exposure, by the swiftness 
of the chastisement that followed, gave him the 
opportunity of becoming a saint. He took it." 
Yes, brethren, it would be safest to take that way. 
We cannot go back to Bethlehem ; we do not want 
to, but we can go forward, past Calvary to the 
eternal hills, and drink of the river of life. And 
the spirits and the saints say, Come. And let him 
that heareth say, Come, And let him that is athirst 
come. And whosoever will, let him take the water 
of life freely. 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 



No one particular circumstance brought forth the following sermon. 
Rather it was suggested by a series of accumulated incidents ; so 
many people came or wrote to me concerning the belittling effect 
of petty every day problems, limited horizons, galling domestic mis- 
fits, and uninspiring vocations. Meditating how best to help them, 
there came to me the thought that the source of disquiet in every 
instance lay in failure to discover the light of God in the common 
things of life. To grapple with even the most ordinary problems 
of existence a man must idealise his real. He who has eyes to see 
may behold what Moses saw — the splendour of God in the wayside 
task. It may not be out of place to state that God greatly blessed 
this sermon in helping many hearers to see amid their daily tasks 
the " light that never was on sea or land." 



XII 



"And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out 
of the midst of a bush ; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with 
fire, and the bush was not consumed." — Exodus iii. 2. 

The event to which our text alludes is one of the 
greatest which has ever taken place in the history 
of mankind, although it seems so humble and so 
little noteworthy in itself. By this I mean that its 
effects, in accumulating sequence, have been pro- 
foundly significant and tremendous. No one requires 
to ask why. There are a few things in history upon 
which all civilisation, all human well-being, all 
possibility of moral advance, appear to turn, and 
this is one of them. It is no exaggeration to say 
that what we reverence most in our life to-day, the 
things by which we live and for which we would 
die, were locked up with Moses at Horeb on the 
day about which we have been reading. I am 
not inclined to dispute about the historicity of 
Moses and his work for Israel, and the account 
of himself that he has put into these pages, nor, 
indeed, whether he wrote them at all. The fact 
remains that there is just as much evidence for the 
historicity of Moses as there is for the historicity of 
Justinian, and we have good reason to believe that 

207 



208 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

the Jewish leader placed his mark deeper into the 
history of mankind than did the Roman Emperor. 
Let us try to understand how Moses came to be at 
Horeb, and what it was he saw. We cannot under- 
stand it without following in some detail the account 
of his life as it is given in this book. 

The child of an enslaved people, his life saved by 
the devotion of a mother and sister, who hid him in 
the water in which babes of his own age and race 
had been thrown to be drowned : discovered by the 
daughter of the great King himself: brought up as 
a favourite at Court : learned in all the wisdom of 
the Egyptians : regarded as the son of Pharaoh's 
daughter — here was a gentleman by training, 
outlook, environment, everything that the high 
civilisation of Egypt could give him at that day. 
But when he came to mature years he made a 
discovery. Those who had given him birth, those 
of his own kith and kin, the race in which he could 
discern his own lineaments, were lying under the 
oppressor's heel. The cry of Israel was going up 
continually to a seemingly deaf God. The lash of 
the taskmaster was present with them in all their 
daily toil, and their woe was an accumulating totality 
which Moses could not contemplate unmoved. So, 
as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, 
the hour came when this man — for he was a man — 
''refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's 
daughter." He belonged to the oppressed people, 
and with his own people he took his stand. He 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 209 

did more than that. He had not been reared a 
slave, and, therefore, he was not able to behold 
without an attempt to remove it the oppression of 
those he loved. He slew an Egyptian to save a 
Hebrew, and then fled for his life. 

How many years Moses spent in the wilderness 
we do not know ; half a life-time it must have been. 
He was not a young man on the day of this vision 
which we read of in Exodus iii., but we may 
understand that all this time, away from the scenes 
of his youth, he had been brooding upon the wrongs 
of his own people, and wondering how he might 
save them. He had heard of Israel's God, because 
he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. 
Israel did not know as much about Jehovah, perhaps, 
as he did ; they had forgotten their Lord. Not so 
Moses. On this particular day, as he was leading 
his flock towards Horeb, it seems to him as though 
Israel's God has come to him, and spoken with him, 
and he hears the mandate from heaven : " Go back ! 
save your people ; lead them forth from the land of 
Egypt, and out of the house of bondage." He 
questioned within himself as to whether he had seen 
rightly and heard truly. "Who am I? — a poor 
shepherd of the wilderness, an exile, unprotected, 
unknown. Why, the people of Israel themselves 
will have forgotten me. Why should I heed ? This 
may be an hallucination, and the voice itself the 
voice of my own consciousness : who am I to effect 
this great deliverance ? " But the vision is still 

o 



2 1 o BURNING— U NCONSU MED 

there, and the voice he still hears, and presently, 
unquestioning, he obeys ; and history, as I say, came 
to one of its turning-points as Moses moved back to 
the land of Egypt, whence he had fled. He goes 
to make a nation ; he goes to revive, and, in a sense, 
to found, a religion ; he goes — now we are looking 
a long way — that Britons might be born, that this 
congregation might worship here, that we should 
take upon our lips the name of Jesus. Such it was 
took place in that far-off day. 

Now, I have no mind to say a single word which 
would rob this theme of any of its grandeur; my 
aim would rather be to help you to behold it in 
greater fulness. I am not sure that many of us are 
thinking of it rightly now. I can remember, for 
instance, as a child, as doubtless many of you can, 
when an illustrated book of Scripture stories was 
put into my hands ; and I have fond recollections of 
that book, for I spent many happy hours over it. In 
it an attempt was made, in rough, inartistic fashion, 
to portray what Moses saw in the desert near to 
Horeb. A little shrub not much bigger than a goose- 
berry-bush was on fire ; in the midst of it stood a 
shadowy form ; before it knelt Moses, taking off 
his sandals. Looking back now, I can see a little 
the absurdity of the suggestion of the immature 
artist. But are you quite sure that you see any 
farther into the mystery even now than the artist 
of my youth-time saw ? Let us see whether some- 
one else has not. I have in my hands an excellent 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 211 

and suggestive little book, " The Education of 
Christ," by Professor Ramsay, of the University of 
Aberdeen. The purpose of the book is to show 
that even Jesus must have been influenced in youth 
by the environment in which He was placed, to an 
enormous degree, and not least in that environment 
was the splendour, the magnificence of the scenery 
of the historic neighbourhood in which that youth 
was spent. On the mountain sides where Jesus 
climbed, Moses or the people of Moses themselves 
had stood ; there had taken place some of the most 
famous events in the history of Israel. It was im- 
possible, thinks Professor Ramsay, but that the very 
atmosphere of it all, the suggestions of it, the radiat- 
ing influences thereof passed into the mind, the heart, 
and the very fibre of the mental constitution of Jesus 
of Nazareth. In working out this thesis, the Pro- 
fessor has a chapter on what he calls, " The Power 
of the Great Plains," and in it he quotes the follow- 
ing from a novel describing the American prairie. 
It is the experience of a cow-boy. 

" Two days ago he was riding back, alone, in the afternoon, from 
an unsuccessful search after strayed horses, and suddenly, all in the 
lifting of a hoof, the weird prairies had gleamed into eerie life, 
had dropped the veil and spoken to him ; while the breeze stopped, 
and the sun stood still for a flash in waiting for his answer. And 
he, his heart in a grip of ice, the frozen flesh a-crawl with terror 
upon his loosened bones, white-lipped and wide-eyed with frantic 
fear, uttered a yell of horror as he dashed the spurs into his panic- 
stricken horse, in a mad endeavour to escape from the Awful 
Presence that filled all earth and sky from edge to edge of vision. 



2 1 2 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

Then, almost in the same fashion, the unearthly light died out of 
the dim prairie, the veil swept across into place again, and he 
managed to check his wild flight and look about him. It was as 
if his spirit stood apart from him, putting questions which he could 
not answer, and demanding judgment upon problems which he 
dare not reason out. Then he remembered what this thing was 
which had happened. The prairie had spoken to him, as, 
sooner or later, it spoke to most men that rode it. It was a 
something well known amongst them, but known without words, 
and, as by a subtle instinct, for no man who had experienced it 
ever spoke willingly about it afterwards. Only the man would be 
changed ; some began to be more reckless, as if a dumb blasphemy 
rankled hidden in their breasts. Others, coming with greater 
strength, perhaps, to the ordeal, became quieter, looking squarely 
at any danger as they faced it, but continuing ahead as though 
quietly confident that nothing happened save as the gods ordained." 

That is a powerful passage, and I make bold to 
say that I think I understand something of what 
was in the writer's mind ; I think I may venture to 
affirm that some of you do also. There are at least 
two experiences in my life in which I can remember 
something similar. One was on this very American 
prairie, near to the Colorado mountains. I and my 
companion were alone in the observation car of an 
American railway train, riding away from the moun- 
tains, which rose like a craggy wall in the distance. 
There came on such a thunderstorm as we seldom 
or never see in Britain. There, before us, on 
the further side of the long stretch of prairie, 
was this spur of the Rocky mountains, Pike's 
Peak, towering above the rest. The great gorges 
seemed to be filled with flame, and round the top of 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 2 1 3 

that mountain peak the lightning flamed like a 
crown of fiery thorns, every now and then thrusting 
down on to the prairie itself a sheet of flame — an 
avalanche, as it seemed, relentless, irresistible, making 
us to feel how puny we were, how great were the 
elementals in the midst of which we had been thrust. 
There was nothing common there; the prairie was 
just as it had been the day before, only that it was 
clothed with a new and sudden splendour, hidden in 
the heavens until that moment of vision. You will 
hardly need to be told that the effect upon us was a 
solemnising one ; our leading thought was of the 
splendour of God. 

My other experience was in South Africa. We 
were climbing in the night, also in a railway train, 
from the level plain around Cape Town up to that 
great table-land which is known as the Karoo. We 
seemed as though we had just reached the top when 
morning dawned. I drew aside the blind of my 
sleeping-carriage and looked out. There, stretching 
around us in every direction for hundreds of miles, 
was the flat plain of the veldt, studded with little 
bushes like the acacia that Moses saw, in the far 
distance rising the unclothed crags with the flat 
tops so characteristic of South Africa. But there 
was this addition. Not only was the solitude broken, 
but it was broken by a sudden splendour. The 
morning sun touched every thing into glory. You 
who live in Britain have little or no idea of the vivid- 
ness of colour on these vast plains. The very rocks 



2 1 4 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

were sporting crimson, and all the little shrubs were 
tinted with gold. It was a never-to-be-forgotten 
sight. Once again we fell silent ; there was nothing 
to be said ; we were in the presence of the real — it 
seemed as if all spake of the Eternal. Granted, we 
bring something to the vision ; it might be possible 
for a man to herd cattle in the South African bush 
and never to see its glory ; it might be possible for 
a man to climb the craggy sides of Pike's Peak and 
never again see the splendour of the moment I have 
described. The one grand message which our text 
contains for us resides in this : Moses saw something 
that day which he was fitted to see. We understand 
now something of what it was. Our text says really, 
not "a bush," but " the bush." He did not see a 
flaming gooseberry- bush, as it were ; the whole 
landscape was lit up with the glory of the Lord upon 
whose name he had been brooding. The past history 
of his people fired him as he thought that the God 
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not dead but 
alive ; he felt his heart thrill and quiver. There was 
something for him to do ; God was speaking, God 
was calling. He questioned with himself no longer ; 
he turned in obedience to the heavenly vision granted 
in the desert. 

The value of our text for you and me resides in 
the similarity of our experience with that of the 
great prophet. The divine is never absent from the 
soul of him who has eyes to see and a heart to feel 
the presence of the Eternal Real ; every common bush 



BURNING— UNGONSUMED 2 1 5 

is afire with God, and every place is holy ground. 
The flame, the very flame that Moses saw in the 
desert at Horeb, is burning still and unconsumed. 

The world is full of God, and not only so, but 
God calls His master men by the voice that speaks 
from the flame. A holy enthusiasm can see and 
hear what is hidden from selfishness and sin. 

" Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! 

But not quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure, tho' seldom, are denied us, 

When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 

And apprise it, if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 

To its triumph or undoing. 

u There are flashes struck from midnights, 

There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
Whereby piled-up honours perish, 

Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle ; 
While just this or that poor impulse, 

Which for once had played unstifled, 
Seems the sole work of a life-time 

That away the rest have trifled." 

Yes, His holy flame for ever burns. There is nothing 
common or unclean, for we see shining upon it the 
light divine ; and never do you see that light shining 
— the light that never was on sea or land — but from 
the midst of the flame there comes the call of God. 

I think I know my congregation pretty well ; it is 
like any other congregation in that it contains people 
of diverse yet similar experiences, now of sorrow, 



2 1 6 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

now of joy, all of limitation — limitation which we 
seek at our best moments to transcend. The 
people to whom I am speaking are for the most 
part trained in the midst of petty ideas ; but 
one and all of you are capable of wonderful 
things. There are here frivolous people, selfish 
people, worldly people, people who hardly ever 
pause to put two serious thoughts together. On 
the other hand, there are people here who have 
been stricken down by sorrow, who know the 
shadow as well as the sunshine, and far more of the 
shadow than of the shining. All of us, however, 
have our best moments, and in those moments we 
would, if we could, get past the limitation and into 
the glory and live worthier. Do I say wrong if I 
repeat, you are by virtue of those moments capable 
of wonderful things ? The most commonplace, the 
most selfish, the most worldly-minded, might be 
changed, if he only saw in the desert what Moses 
saw, and heard on the plain the voice of God. 
Many times have I seen on the face of a common- 
place man something that kindled into power. 
Have you not seen it? What is the cause of it? 
I take it that it is but the reflection of the vision 
that was seen at Horeb. It is when God speaks to 
a man's innermost being, when God has reached 
what is most like Himself in our nature, and we have 
responded, and heart and mind and countenance 
light up with it, that people cease to think of us as 
commonplace. Of that shining, which is as the glory 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 2 1 7 

of the Shekinah we may know nothing ourselves ; 
like Moses, we may not know that our face shines. 

" We are the children of splendour of flame, 
Of shuddering also, and tears : 
Magnificent out of the dust we came, 
And abject from the spheres." 

God is not far from any one of us. I wish to 
particularise by choosing, as it were, two people 
from the congregation and speaking directly to 
them. It may strike you as odd that the first I 
choose is a woman. " Speaking about the great 
Law-giver of Israel, and then in the same breath 
comparing his experience and applying it to that of 
a woman, surely you have begun at the wrong end 
of things!" Not at all. I take the life of a 
woman for this reason. For the most part, in this 
land of ours — for we have not yet learned to do 
things right — the life of a woman is narrower and 
meaner than the life of a man — man's fault mostly, 
but there it is. I doubt not that in this congrega- 
tion this morning there sits some woman full of 
possibilities for good, who came in here sad and 
heavy-hearted indeed. She has been beating her 
wings against the cage all her life ; things have 
never come right to her, and she has felt, and she is 
right in feeling, that she was made for better than 
anything yet she has ever chanced to live. Even 
when marriage came, it may be, it was not liberty. 
Your life is spent amongst the humdrum, the 
commonplace, even the sordid ; no liberty for the 



2 1 8 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

soul. The things you once saw, as it were, on the 
cliff-tops of the morning you have had to try to 
forget, and yet you cannot forget ; disappointment 
and heart-break have done their work. You entered 
the house of God to-day in the faint hope that some 
word might come to you, as it were, from the lips 
of God that should be somewhat of a compensation 
and a solace. Have I described your life aright? 
Well, now, listen to me. Take care what you seek 
when you come here to call upon the name of Jesus. 
Moses would have understood Jesus ; that was why, 
and it was a very felicitous thing, Peter saw him 
standing beside Him on the mount of vision. 
Moses would have understood ; perhaps you would 
not. Self-pity is the wrong mood in which to come 
near Calvary. The thought of escaping from things 
that hinder, of running away from the duty that 
seems to be cramping and repellent, getting peace 
by cessation of strife, is not the right thought to 
have when one comes into the presence of Jesus. 
Mind you, you are perfectly right when you feel 
that you are entitled to the satisfaction and the 
peace that you have never yet had. You are 
perfectly wrong if you feel that coming to Jesus 
means, as it were, a letting you off the things against 
which your soul is chafing. It will be quite the 
other way. The peace will come and the satisfac- 
tion be yours, but it will be when you have trampled 
down the lower nature and thrust it beneath you in 
the energies of your soul. God is speaking to you 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 219 

out of the flame, but the message is : Back to 
Egypt, to the people that will not understand, to the 
people that will cry for the fleshpots when you 
have led them out ; back to the sordid, narrow, 
commonplace ; but see it in the light of Horeb, in 
all the splendour of God. Some women have done 
it who were as little likely as you are ever to see 
such a vision as that which Moses saw. 

I brought into the pulpit with me this morning 
another book, from which I venture to quote. 
Most of us are familiar to some extent, at any rate, 
with the writings of Mark Rutherford. They are 
especially pleasing to me because they treat of 
common life and of very ordinary people. He does 
not idealise the characters of the people, but it 
seems as if he could turn on to them something of 
the light that shone into the desert of Horeb. He 
tells us, in that part of his Autobiography which he 
calls Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, of the dislike 
he felt for his little stepdaughter Marie. He could 
never understand the child. She was growing into 
womanhood without the barrier having once dis- 
appeared between her and him, until one day sorrow 
came to that home — bewildering, crushing, over- 
whelming sorrow — and he found he was unable to 
face it. In that mood, helpless, the man stood ; 
forward came the child. 

" What a change came over that child ! I was amazed at her. 
All at once she seemed to have found what she was born to do. 
The key had been discovered which unlocked and revealed what 



2 2o BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

there was in her, of which hitherto I had been altogether unaware. 
. . . Faculties unsuspected grew almost to full height in a single 
day. ... I remember once going to her cot in the night, as she 
lay asleep, and almost breaking my heart over her with remorse 
and thankfulness ; remorse that I, with blundering stupidity, had 
judged her so superficially, and thankfulness that it had pleased 
God to present to me so much of His own divinest grace. . . . 
My love to Marie was love of God Himself as He is . . . because 
that revelation had clothed itself with a child's form. ... I 
appeal, moreover, to Jesus Himself for justification. I had seen 
that kingdom of God through a little child. " 

But for the sordid, but for the commonplace, and 
but for the sorrow that shivered both, Mark 
Rutherford had never seen the soul of that woman- 
child. So it may be, so it is, with any woman, with 
any child, with any man, anywhere. God calls from 
the midst of the flame. He never summons you to 
what you are unequal to. 

" He who bids us forward go 
Cannot fail the way to show." 

God has never asked what you cannot give, never 
set a task you cannot perform. Go back to your 
life ; go back to the questions you have left, but go 
back with the enthusiasm of old Israel and this leader 
of men to nerve you. God is speaking from the 
midst of common things, but He is speaking from 
the things that flame, not merely from the things 
that repel. So Jesus calls to you, and will have the 
best from you. Believe that the best is yours to be 
and to do and to give. 

Now I would speak of a man, with whom some of 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 221 

you think I ought to have begun. It is a curious 
thing, but a fact, that the greater number of the 
men I see around me have not succeeded in life ; by 
which I mean that their early enthusiasms have not 
been realised. As you grow toward midlife you 
feel you are disappointed — you are nobody in par- 
ticular after all ; you once thought you might be, 
As you have learned to be practical, you have 
learned to dethrone your ideal. It does not seem 
sensible for a man at midlife to talk as he would 
have talked when he stood on the threshold of 
manhood. But sometimes you wish that God had 
given you to do something worthy of that which 
you saw in your highest moments, in your enthus- 
iastic days, the times when you could have given 
yourself for an ideal ; but there is no stake at which 
to be burned, there is only a desk at which to 
be chained ; there is no big heroic thing to be done ; 
there is just the rent to get and the little mouths to 
feed, and it takes all your time and all your manhood 
to do that. You feel that the effect of your en- 
vironment upon you is to shrivel you, and make you 
less a man than you once hoped to be. You have 
entered the house of God with some hope of being 
made contented with your lot, or at least forgetting 
it for a time. You are quite wrong about the mood, 
and you are quite wrong about the history. The 
biggest things in history are taking place out of 
sight, this one in Horeb amongst the rest. You 
never know the value of service in the light of 



222 BURNING— UNCONSUMED 

the Eternal ; never call a human deed small or great 
until you stand on the other side of death and know 
as you are known. What we want nowadays is the 
righting mystic. Young men, as a rule, are not 
mystics, though they think they are ; it is the older 
men who come to know best of all that life is not 
what it seems, let alone all it seems. It is possible 
for a man when he has shed his ambitions to go 
back to the simple, holy mood of childhood. Moses 
was not a young man when he saw his vision and 
dreamed his dream ; he was getting to be an old 
man, and it is an old man's vision that we are talking 
about. A strong man, but life behind him. He 
fought his battle in Egypt, and then thought it was 
over. He had buried the man he slew, and fled from 
the people he would have saved. Helpless and 
baffled, he stood alone in the wilderness, an old man, 
looking up and looking back. To him God came in 
the midst of the scrub, and the scrub seemed to light 
up, and the world seemed to expand, and the impos- 
sible became possible, and the unreal shone out real, 
vivid, true, something for Moses to do after all. He 
went back alone, an old man, and alone he did it, 
not a young man. God granted him vision of the 
highest. 

You pray, " Give me comfort ! " I will ; that is 
comfort ; it is not comfort on the low level, but com- 
fort on the high level. " Give me inspiration ! " I 
will ; it is here. And what Moses saw in the flame 
and heard you may see and hear. You will be better 



BURNING— UNCONSUMED 223 

and happier for obedience to what you see in your 
best moments alone with God. Enter into the 
atonement of Christ yourself, become part of it. 
Wherever there is a wrong to be righted, Christ is 
at work ; wherever there is a great deed to be done, 
if it is only at the fireside or in the counting-house, 
there is the call of God. Will you be one of God's 
master men ? There is wondrous sweetness and 
power in the very thought. It needs not that you 
should be great, it only needs that you should be 
good. 

" I would not have the restless will that hurries to and fro, 
Seeking for some great thing to do or secret thing to know ; 
I would be treated as a child, and guided where I go." 

Behold, then, before you the bush, burning, uncon- 
sumed. Behold the splendour of God. The Lord 
has come to your little world like a flame of fire. 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 



The following sermon contains two illustrations from real life, but 
neither of them was more than an illustration. The purpose of 
the sermon was to reach one or two people whose moral history, 
had I been at liberty to state it, would have been a much more 
startling and emphatic testimony than anything I actually did say. 
The truth about one of these was as follows : On a previous 
Thursday a friend had brought to me a story concerning a family 
whom he expected to see in the City Temple on the following 
Sunday evening. He particularly wished me not to describe their 
circumstances too accurately for fear he or someone else should be 
suspected of having made me acquainted with the facts. I may 
remark in parenthesis that this often takes place : I outline a 
situation and state a moral question as I have met them in real 
life. Forthwith someone writes to say that he suspects I have 
heard something about him — as a rule I have never heard of him 
before. 

This particular story was one of persistent, calculated cruelty 
on the part of an individual whose public character stood rather 
high. If ever a man was guilty of soul murder it was this 
eloquent denouncer of other people's sins. He had pronounced 
views on national morality, the wrongs of the Boers, and many 
other things. The vileness of his home conduct I verily believe 
he never stopped to think about. If he recognised himself in 
Nathan's denunciation he was careful never to say so. Of course 
he was not the only one present whom it was sought to reach by 
this gospel of self-revelation. 



XIII 

" And Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man." — 2 Samuel xii. 7. 

In this lurid sentence the prophet of God con- 
demned the guilty king out of his own mouth. It 
was no mild utterance this, but one charged with 
moral passion and righteous anger. The circum- 
stances called for the word, too. The wretched 
man upon the throne now saw, and for the first 
time, what his sin really was. No more dastardly 
act had ever stained David's life. It was the 
blackest of his reign — I mean the abduction of the 
wife of Uriah and the murder of her husband. It 
was guilt calculated upon and persisted in, guilt 
covered up even in David's own mind by sophistry 
and self-excuse. Now comes the moment of revela- 
tion, when the true state of things is declared to 
David's consciousness just as it had long ago been 
declared subconsciously, though he never dared to 
face the truth, 

It can hardly be necessary that I should recount 
the circumstances. The king of Israel cast his 
lustful eyes upon another man's wife. In his un- 
scrupulousness he planned the destruction of him 
who stood between his lust and its gratification. 
Uriah must be got out of the way, and in a very 

327 



228 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

base and wicked fashion the deed was done. Uriah 
was placed in the front of the fighting line and died 
with his face to the foe. The irony of the situa- 
tion is that he died as an Israelitish soldier fighting 
for his country, and not improbably with the name 
of his king upon his lips and enthusiasm for David 
in his heart, charging the foe for the man who was 
his murderer. Doubtless David covered up the fact, 
which Uriah himself never knew, by saying to him- 
self, " This man died a worthy death — why not he 
as well as any other soldier ? I did not slay him, the 
enemy slew him. In all probability he would not 
have chosen another death if he were a true soldier 
and patriot. I am not guilty ; therefore now what 
more natural than that I without reproach should 
take unto me Uriah's wife ? " 

Probably this was the way that David accounted 
for the deed to himself. Not so the prophet of the 
Lord. Israel was fortunate in that she possessed, 
and never was entirely without, one or two intrepid, 
fearless men of God, men of the pattern and stamp 
of Elijah, and such a one was Nathan. 

Imagine the scene that is hinted at in this chapter 
rather than described. David, royal David, sits 
upon the throne in the day of his splendour, sur- 
rounded by his mighty men, and the plain-garbed 
figure of the prophet of God appears on the scene. 
He is made welcome — why should it not be so ? 
This victorious king is the chosen of the Lord. 
What message can Nathan have to bring but a 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 229 

message of good ? The court is hushed to listen. 
The wisdom and righteousness of David respond 
eagerly to the demand of the prophet. Thus 
and such the rich man has done. Thus and such 
vengeance is called for, retribution to be awarded. 
What saith the king ? " And David's anger was 
greatly kindled against the man; and he said to 
Nathan, As the Lord liveth (you see David is on 
the side of the Lord) the man that hath done this 
thing shall surely die. (David is the sword of 
the Lord.) And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, 
because he did this thing and because he had no 
pity." 

Thus he voices his own condemnation, thus he 
seals his own doom. The court is silent, waiting 
for the prophet to speak. One sentence it is which 
issues from his lips, how terrible, only David knew, 
though the awe-stricken listeners must have felt, 
too, something of the impact of the tremendous 
utterance, " Thou art the man." 

I cannot imagine that Nathan said these words 
with a shout. Rather he spoke them more quietly 
than David had blazed forth his ready anger. 
David on the seat of judgment passing sentence 
upon himself may speak eagerly and feverishly 
on the side of righteousness, " This man shall 
surely die." Said Nathan (he does not need to 
shriek): "Thou art the man — thou!" 

Self-deception is never very difficult. Men are 
curiously averse to calling things by the right name. 



230 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

There is no kind of hypocrisy so subtle and so 
dangerous as the hypocrisy which is hypocrite to 
itself and will not acknowledge its own presence. 
We can see transgression very plainly in the lives of 
others, but we are, as a rule, unwilling to face the 
truth concerning ourselves. But that truth will out, 
and in the light of God we have to face it whether 
we will or no. " Be sure your sin will find you 
out." 

Such was the note of my theme this morning. 
For the benefit of those who were not present I 
will just give one point in the message. It was 
this : — Oftentimes God finds a way into a man's 
heart by breaking him, as it were, upon the wheel 
of misfortune. To some natures, at any rate, sorrow 
is the only means, the only instrument whereby 
God can make the highest felt. A man suffers 
what ostensibly he does not deserve, something 
unjust, something so far as the world is concerned 
utterly irremediable. That something must be God's 
message to him, God's means of uncovering the 
soul that He may address Himself thereto. 

Two men came into the vestry after that sermon 
this morning. One followed upon the heels of the 
other. The first man, a gentleman in appearance, 
told me this striking story — shall I say gave me this 
striking piece of autobiography ? " I am one man 
you were talking about this morning. I have suffered 
seven years' penal servitude for something I did not 
do, and which it is now known I did not do. You 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 231 

can read the circumstances in the daily papers. 
They speak of making me amends. Of course you 
know nothing can ever make amends for the seven 
best years of my life. I did not deserve, from one 
point of view, as you rightly said, what came to me. 
But you were perfectly right in what you have said 
in that I deserved it in another sense. By that fiery 
discipline God woke my soul to life. I now know 
that the things which we can see and touch, the 
things commonplace and everyday, the things for 
which we spend ourselves, are not the real, are 
not the truest, are not the deepest, are not all. 
They are only the gateway into the eternal. I 
have found God. It was worth the seven years." 

As he turned to go out, another man came in, 
from the north country, also a gentleman, a man of 
a certain education and standing and prosperity. If 
he be here to-night he will not mind, I am sure, 
what I am going to tell you, for it is by no means 
uncommon. He came to remind me of a boy whom 
years ago I knew, and he told me that somewhere 
that lad is in London, and if possible he would that 
I could find him, or if he ever comes to me that I 
will detain him with a message of love from his 
Lancashire home. He said, " We do not know 
where he is, and we feel that the truth were 
perhaps better hidden from us." The boy was 
educated to be a professional man. He never took 
his degree. His parents began to suspect, long, 
long before he left home for good, that something 



232 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

was wrong. Sympathy ceased. He lived his life 
apart. He kept away from the ordinary, simple 
family altar which was erected every day in that 
home. His fellowship with his brothers and sisters, 
let alone with his father and mother, was severed. 
There was an absence of frankness. Something or 
other unaccountably was being kept back. You 
see, the false note had been sounded, the evil and 
hateful something had crept in, there was an element 
that had to be huddled away and kept out of sight. 
The inevitable hour came. He could no longer stay 
where he was. That home is mourning to-day 
because of a wandering lad. I wonder now if that 
young man could change places with the ex-convict 
about whom I have spoken, which of the two is to 
be the more pitied. God seems to have treated the 
one I named first far more sternly than he treated 
the other, for the prison walls have not closed upon 
this lad yet. But for all that I would venture to say 
that whereas the one man has gone out with a con- 
sciousness of self-respect, with a confidence in the 
eternal Tightness of things, and with a vision of the 
meaning of life such as he never had till the chastise- 
ment came, this other man, this man who is the 
cause of a home affliction and a home scattering is 
in hell, that is where he is, though he walks the 
streets of London, or though he may be to-night in 
the house of the strange woman, laughing the 
loudest among his companions. That man is in 
hell, and he knows it. His sin has found him out, 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 233 

the evil, sinister fate, has got a very tight grip. It 
matters little what the circumstances are. Of the 
two he is the one to be pitied, and his lot is the one 
to be dreaded. How little it matters what a man 
endures, how much it matters what a man is ! 
" Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our 
secret sins in the light of Thy countenance." If 
that man had faced years ago what was coming and 
now is, if he had had the moral courage to turn 
right round, cost what it might, it would have been 
better for him than what is true of him now. 

There are many present, no doubt, who can 
relate similar experiences concerning themselves or 
their loved ones. Out of a congregation as large as 
this it is safe to say perhaps thousands, two thousand 
it may be, have known or passed through a similar 
experience to the one I have touched on. Either 
you or that lad of yours, that friend, that wife, that 
husband, began to live a life apart from truth and 
right. Confidence was slipping away, some secret 
weakness was unconfessed, some evil entanglement 
was holding fast the soul in fetters. If only the 
right name were to be applied to the life that some 
of you are living or have been living, or the nearest 
and the dearest have lived or do live — if the right 
name were applied what would it be ? Oftentimes 
it is too ugly to be applied. We can cheat our- 
selves as David did, that because the world knows 
nothing and because there is a euphemistic word to 
describe a foul thing, that therefore God is deceived 



234 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

too. He is not, and heaven is not. The world 
of truth interpenetrates this, the world of glory- 
is not a handbreadth off. You cannot hide from 
the eternal right. As Arthur Hugh Clough hath 
it in one of his most familiar lines, "Listen before 
I die, one word. In old times you called me 
pleasure ; my name is guilt." What a dark name, 
what a foul name, what an unpronounceable shudder- 
ing word you would have to apply if you were 
honest, some of you, to the things you have been 
and the things you have done ! God, you see, 
applies the right word — "Thou art the man." 
What in somebody else you would name unmis- 
takably God has named in you. Often a man's 
degeneration is clear to all about him long before 
it is so to himself. He is ready to blame anyone in 
the world except the man most to blame — himself; 
and he can work up indignation against any form of 
evil not his own. I have known men who could 
write to the newspapers most eloquent letters of 
denunciation concerning some public wrong or some 
mistaken international policy. If these very men 
could have been followed to the fireside you would 
have been able to read a tale of misery in the face 
of their dear ones. And the men oftentimes who 
shriek the loudest at the delinquencies of some who 
are a sign for every man to point at dare not expose 
their own secret lives, the tale would be too squalid 
and too shameful. But, dear friends, God's moment 
comes, the dreadful moment of disillusionment for 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 235 

every soul that has kept away from the truth. It 
may come soon or it may come late, but come it 
surely will. " Thou art the man." 

Speaking this afternoon to Mr Badger about this 
subject, he handed me some lines that, curiously 
enough, had come into his own possession. 

" Though no mortal e'er accused you, 
Though no witness e'er confused you, 
Though the darkness came and fell 
Over even deeds of hell. 

" Though no sign nor any token 
Spoke of one commandment broken. 
Though the world should praise and bless, 
And love add the fond caress. 

** Still your secret sin would find you, 
Pass before your eyes to blind you, 
Burn your heart with hidden shame, 
Scar your cheek with guilty flame. 

*' Sin was never sinned in vain, 
It could always count its slain, 
You yourself must witness be, 
To your own soul's treachery." 

In God's economy, in God's moral world, the 
meaning of punishment is that the soul is compelled 
to see itself as it is, and to acknowledge the eternal 
justice. Come it soon or come it late, God's verdict 
upon sin is written large in the experience of the 
sinner. 

If, my friends, I were to quit the subject here 
it might be enough for some of us, the one word 



236 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

necessary for the vindication of the eternal moral 
order. But it would not be enough for some others. 
I could not help thinking, as I spoke, about the 
wretched man who never needed me to tell him a 
single word of what has been uttered up to this 
point. There may be a man here who could tell it 
to you in far more lurid and convincing terms than I 
have told you, because he has been living it. What 
must such a man have been thinking as I have 
spoken ? Perhaps he may be feeling something of 
rising indignation against the speaker. " Where is 
the good of lacerating an open wound? Why 
remind me of what no earthly verdict can reverse ? 
I must dree my own weird, I have made my bed and 
on it I must lie." A man can grow cynical, self- 
contemptuous and world-hating all in a breath by the 
remembrance of a fact like this. 

Well, sir, it is to you that I most want to speak. 
You know — those at least who know me know — 
that I do not trifle with the facts of life and tell you 
that sin is done with as soon as you have tossed it 
in the air, so to speak, on the chance that it may 
reach the ears of God as a confession. It is not so. 
The way of transgressors is hard, but it is hard 
because of the mercy of God that is behind. " There 
is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared 
when Thou judgest." 

I was reading recently in one of Maurice Maeter- 
linck's books, I think the last, a paragraph some- 
to this effect. Some of you here will feel that 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 2 3 y 

what Maeterlinck has to say about certain of the 
deep things of the Gospel is hardly worth consider- 
ing, yet you may be wrong. On this occasion, at 
any rate, this modern mystic reached the Gospel 
truth by a roundabout road. This is what he says 
— 1 do not quote, I only paraphrase — If a man hath 
done a guilty deed, if a man hath been betrayed by 
himself, dragged down by evil propensity, and hath 
the courage and the faith to rise again, the day 
comes, the moment is his when he can say, It was 
not I that did it. 

Of course you see the paradox of the mystic. 
Yes, but it was a truth stated in paradox. A man 
may so rise above the habitual level of his own 
character that deeds are forgotten. It is not so 
much the deeds that matter, it is the climate of the 
soul, it is the moral atmosphere in which you live 
that is telling out the truth. A man's real fall often 
antedates by long the fall that the world can see 
and judge him by. But, look you, if a man has 
risen so far by virtue of his penitence that he 
reaches the heart of God; so exalting himself by 
true humility that he is no longer capable of that 
old sin, it is, as it were, blotted out of the book of 
remembrance. To such a man I would be entitled 
to say in the name of the Lord of Hosts, " Thou 
art not the man," the man that was, but another, 
redeemed, purified, made holy by the Spirit of 
God. 

There are some people who are morbid in their 



238 SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 

introspection and their view of their own moral 
delinquencies. To such people I would speak a 
word of warning. Remorse is not repentance. 
Morbidness is by no means humility. There is 
another way and a higher. If there be one man 
here who feels that his life is blackened by his own 
misdoing, I entreat him to pause and consider this 
mighty truth. It is impossible for you to contend 
with God. Once you have realised that there is no 
longer need for you to remain in the prison-house. 
If any man is hopeless concerning the past I call 
him to a deeper as well as a higher life. An old 
mediaeval mystic once wrote, "In every man there 
is a godly will which never consented to sin nor 
ever shall." You know what that signifies. It 
tells you that the deepest self in every man is 
Christ. What ? Yes, I mean it. Until conscience 
is dead Christ is not gone from the soul of any man, 
but that Christ you may be crucifying ; and as the 
preacher to-night I have just the same duty as the 
Roman Governor performed in an earlier day when, 
half cynically, half pityingly, he brought out the 
Christ and set Him before the mob, " Behold the 
Man ! " the man that you are crucifying in your 
self-loathings, in your self-despisings, in your hatred 
of the world and its temptations and its delusions, 
crucifying the Christ within you by staying down in 
the bondage of sin. Greater is your sin in the re- 
jection of the redemption of the Most High, it may 
be, than the sin which plunged you into your self- 



SIN'S SELF-DISCOVERY 239 

despair. Listen to the voice that comes from 
farthest heaven, "I will blot out as a cloud thy 
transgressions and as a thick cloud thy sins." 
"Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be 
white as snow ; though they be red like crimson, 
they shall be as wool." There is a great mystery 
here and I am content to leave it so. God speaks 
through the voice of conscience, the self-accuser, the 
one that no man can escape, no man can avoid, no 
man can delude. "Thou art the man." Say, then, 
to the Father, "I have sinned against heaven and 
before Thee." Then hast thou found thyself, thou 
hast come back to God ere the words are uttered, 
and the Father's word to thee is this word of for- 
giveness and mercy and tender love. Rise, thou 
child of the holiest, though in the deepest of depths 
thou hast plunged thyself and sunken thy soul, for 
God the Father pitieth His children, God the 
Saviour redeemeth His own. "Behold the Lamb 
of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 



Q 



It may be interesting to some readers to know that the indi- 
viduals for whose sake this sermon was preached are described in 
the application. Moreover, they recognised it, and came to tell 
me so. It is a simple, although somewhat exceptional theme, but 
I never remember to have experienced greater blessing both in and 
after the service. This was God's timely word for a number of 
those who worshipped with us that morning. 



XIV 

" Behold I dreamed a dream, and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled 
into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent, and smote it that it fell." 
— Judges vii. 13. 

This is a somewhat remarkable text, and that not 
merely on account of its quaintness, but of the vast 
field of spiritual suggestiveness which it opens to 
us. The phrase, " a cake of barley bread," may 
not at first sight appear to mean much, but it covers 
a whole chapter in a brave and strenuous life. 
Here we have a tiny nation oppressed by powerful 
neighbours. They are not a great people. Al- 
though they have been known in history as the 
Chosen People, they are few in number, apparently 
are weak in character, they have just fallen under 
the dominion and worship of the obscene god Baal. 
Jehovah appears to have deserted them. They 
would not have their Father's God, so He has left 
them to their own. They have been reduced to 
extremity. They have been maltreated by the 
oppressors, and at this, the darkest moment in the 
fortunes of Israel, a deliverer arises, not from among 
the leaders of the people, nor from those who stand 
in high places, but as has often been the case in 
history, from the lower ranks themselves. 

Gideon is the hero in question, a man of the 

243 



244 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

same stature and quality as Wallace and William 
Tell. He begins by questioning with himself how 
long the worship of Baal, with its immoral, de- 
grading and obscene rites, was to be tolerated in 
Israel. Someone must have the courage to speak 
and to do something more than speak, someone 
must have the intrepidity to act. And Gideon 
thinks it may as well be he as anyone else. So one 
morning credulous, self-indulgent Israel rises to see 
the god Baal hurled from his pedestal and helpless 
to avenge the affront. Their first thought is to 
revenge it for him. They would have slain Gideon 
but for the intervention of his father. " If Baal is 
injured, and if Baal is worthy to be worshipped, let 
Baal, and Baal alone, revenge the injury. Hold ye 
your peace." So Gideon earned the name of 
Jerubaal, the antagonist of this hitherto powerful 
deity. His next step is to consider whether Israel, 
won back to the purer worship of Jehovah, might 
not be delivered from the sword of the oppressor. 
Who is to do this? The Amalekites and the 
Midianites are as the sand of the sea for multitude, 
and Israel but a handful, and a handful of slaves at 
that. But, his resolution once taken, this man, 
questioning within himself, arrives at the conclusion 
that he himself is the chosen of the Lord to do the 
work. How often he hesitates, like Moses and like 
most of the Israelitish prophets, leaders, captains, 
judges! He is self-distrustful. He puts the Lord 
first to one test and then to another. He is not free 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 245 

from the superstitions of his time, and who knows 
but "there are more things in heaven and earth 
than are dreamed of in our philosophy." Even the 
test of the fleece may have been honoured to this 
man's good and his people's salvation. Finally, with 
three hundred men at his back he decided to strike 
the first blow. 

But on the very eve of the conflict he hesitates 
once more. How real it all is ! because it was 
taking place within, and not without the man, this 
discussion and this presentation of opposite con- 
ditions. How real it all is ! He goes down to 
listen and to spy within the camp of Midian itself 
and he hears one man tell his fellow a dream. The 
dream is almost in the words of our text. A cake 
of barley bread tumbles into the camp of Midian, 
and smites a tent, and it falls and lies ruined before 
it. Gideon returns without a word. He takes 
it as a symbol, a sign that he, the chosen of the 
Lord, is already victor in the counsels of the Most 
High, and his decision and his act were one and the 
same. To his little band he exclaims, " Arise, the 
Lord has delivered the host of Midian into our hand." 

Why " a cake of barley bread ? " Why did 
this hero attach so much importance to this symbol ? 
First, it was the symbol of poverty. Israel had 
been reduced to this coarse fare, and was not 
obtaining enough of that. Perhaps the enemy 
taunted them with it. This was all they had left, 
the food of the beasts of the field — "a cake of 



246 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

barley bread." It was the symbol of weakness — 
the cake of bread against the tent of the Midianit- 
ish general. It was the symbol of obscurity — 
Gideon himself was as a cake of barley bread, a 
labouring man called to be the instrument of God 
for the deliverance of his country. 

Now let me tell you why I think this piece of 
human history is so interesting and helpful. It is 
because what is here related took place, for the 
most part, in Gideon's mind, and he had no more 
to help him to a decision than you and I have in 
similar issues. The moment you bring in an un- 
necessary supernaturalism, that moment you destroy 
the value of any biblical narrative ; you push away 
from you the man whose life ought to be an in- 
spiration for you. There is a supernaturalism in 
this narrative just the same as there is in yours, 
of the same kind, and perhaps in the same degree. 
I am not one of those who try to read out of every 
event the supernatural element. I would rather 
read it in all round. God's wonders have not 
stopped since Old Testament days, and there is 
just the same kind of supernaturalism in your life 
and mine as there was in Gideon's at this time. 

We have here a case in which a man with 
nothing to aid him but his sense of God and 
right, essayed a seemingly hopeless task, and accom- 
plished it. No one else was even willing to try. 
Such men are rare in history, but they have 
always been forthcoming when God wanted them. 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 247 

In the political history of mankind there are not a 
few such characters. I have already named two. 
William Wallace, a simple gentleman, saved Scot- 
land at a time when her nobles and even the man 
who should have been her king ceased to believe 
in her freedom and her destiny. Some of them 
had joined the enemy. Hope was extinguished. 
Few cared. u A cake of barley bread." William 
Tell was something more than a legendary character, 
probably, too. A Swiss peasant made history when, 
in spite of all obstacles and in defiance of all pre- 
cedents, he snatched from the jaws of the mightiest 
empire of the world the little republic which exists 
to-day in the very heart of Europe. Benjamin 
Franklin, a humble labouring man, anticipated Mr 
Chamberlain by long years in his pleading with the 
inhabitants of this country, with its crown and with 
its government, not to thrust aside its imperial 
destiny. He strove to avert the fate of his country 
— shall I say, he strove to avert the separation of 
his country from the motherland? He failed, so 
he proceeded to make a nation on the other side. 
Out of Benjamin Franklin's brain, to a large extent, 
the American Constitution and the American Re- 
public sprang. A labouring man — " a cake of barley 
bread " — a maker of history. Joan of Arc — one name 
suggests another — a peasant girl, a victim of French 
selfishness and English tyranny, but to-day the patron 
saint of her country — "a cake of barley bread." 
In the religious world, in religious history, the 



248 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

facts are even more instructive — Francis of Assisi, a 
friendless youth, expelled from his father's house 
without so much as clothes to cover him, the regenera- 
tor of Christendom ; Savonarola, a preaching friar, 
unarmed, defenceless, pitted against the mightiest 
system the world had ever seen, and up to a point, 
though it cost him his life, a victor and the harbinger 
of victory; John Wycliffe, a poor scholar, " the 
morning star of the Reformation," when princes and 
great nobles, not to speak of the common people, 
dared not to raise their voice against the iniquities 
of Rome ; Martin Luther, the simple monk of Wit- 
tenberg, who tore half Christendom away from the 
See of St Peter ; Hugh Latimer, an English yeoman, 
Reformation bishop and martyr for all time ; John 
Wesley, the son of a clergyman, himself a clergy- 
man of the Church of England, too poor, sometimes, 
to pay his way almost, but the author of the greatest 
revival of modern times, whose followers have belted 
the globe with the story of the gospel, was even 
refused a hearing in the Church he loved so well — 
" a cake of barley bread " against an army. 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon — some people here are 
old enough to remember when he was nicknamed 
" The Essex Bumpkin " — this man was the apostle 
of the nineteenth century. An uneducated Ameri- 
can, D. L. Moody, reduced so low that at one time, 
though there was no fear of him going under, it was 
with him an anxiety how to make ends meet, how 
to carve out for himself a career. When success 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 249 

did come it was laid aside — five thousand dollars a 
year given up to do God's work, and that alone. 
U A cake of barley bread"; but he awoke the 
English-speaking world with the story of the love of 
God. How true are the words of the apostle in my 
second lesson of this morning. " For you see your 
calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after 
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are 
called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of 
the world to confound the wise ; and God hath 
chosen the weak things of the world to confound 
the things which are mighty ; And base things of 
the world, and things which are despised, hath God 
chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to 
nought things that are : That no flesh should glory 
in His presence. But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, 
who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteous- 
ness, and sanctification, and redemption : That, 
according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him 
glory in the Lord." 

To us, looking back on these achievements, it 
seems as though the people I have named could 
never have had a doubt or a tremor. But it was 
not so. Like Gideon, they questioned and hesitated, 
just as you and I do, until the decisive moment came, 
and a moral purpose was formed and carried into 
effect. 

I have in the pulpit here with me this morning a 
copy of the Literary Supplement of the Times of 
last Friday. There is a passage in it to which I 



250 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

would wish to direct your attention. It is well 
worth it. In an able review of a book about the 
" Saints of England," the writer says: — 

" Even to purely scientific minds the subject of the saints — of 
those men and women who, having been born in this world, have 
renounced at some period in their history the usual fashions of the 
world, and in consequence have received from contemporaries, or 
posterity, an enduring record of their renunciation — is one of 
extreme interest, as it has ever been of vital importance to mystics 
and members of the Church. Canonization is rarer nowadays 
a great deal than it was in the Middle Ages. Strong souls of 
passionate, humane and spiritual intention live grinding on in our 
material midst with hair shirts infinitely more cruel than any of the 
Middle Ages bound about their worn and exhausted bodies. 
They are often the mothers and fathers of many children, fearless, 
if weary, toilers in a wilderness of sodden city streets ; sometimes 
they are the sons and daughters of almost unendurable family 
circles. And there are even more remarkable and unrecognised 
saints than these — saints who drive in motor-cars and wear their 
eyeballs out beneath the blaze of electric light in drawing-rooms ; 
social saints, these last, ' playing the game ' in the face of disease, 
disgrace, and ruin, for the sake of some family tradition, some 
purely worldly hope for child or brother; that very ' game of life* 
upon which the saints so persistently, joyously, and — may we say 
it? — with such self-satisfaction were wont to turn their backs, and 
thereby win into their memories the * eternal' halos of mankind." 

Just so, had we eyes to see it, as the writer of the 
article has. How true it is to say that God's pur- 
poses are being worked out. God's battles are being 
fought in obscure places, but as surely and as really, 
and in God's eyes with as much value, as any of those 
that have taken place on the great field of history. 

Here before me this morning, I doubt not, though 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 251 

perhaps they have never thought of it, are some 
who are the chosen of the Lord as much as Gideon, 
Luther, Wesley, Moody, only you were chosen for 
the day of small things. Is your vocation of any 
less value on that account ? Not in the least. You 
stand now as plainly outlined before the gaze of 
God and heaven as ever stood a John Wycliffe or a 
Martin Luther when fronting the inquisitors and 
persecutors of old. You are fighting as great a 
battle as Gideon fought, as true a battle, and in the 
purpose of God it may be as worthy a conflict as 
ever he carried to a successful issue. 

Here are God's " cakes of barley bread." Let 
me speak to one or two of you personally. You see 
that man of humble parts, concerning whom the world 
knows but little, but whose lot in life has already 
been so strenuous and so hard. This man is a 
member of a scattered family, gathered perhaps into 
many households. He was just the member of the 
family from whom least was expected when he was 
young. He has had to carve his way alone, and to 
do it against odds. He had no particular chance 
given him; no particular pride was ever shown in 
him. But now — now that his grip and strength of 
character, now that his singleness of purpose and 
honesty of aim have been crowned with a moderate 
amount of success, that man has the burden of the 
rest loaded upon him. How often that occurs in 
human history. Life is not easy for anyone of you. 
It is full of care and tragedy, perhaps, for many who 



252 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

are here just now. Such a man as I have now 
described is one of God's " cakes of barley bread." 
There is nothing very interesting about him. No 
one would ever dream of describing him as remark- 
able, but here he is, carrying not only double, but 
more than double the load he need carry if it were 
not that he had other lives to think of as well as his 
own, so many weak wills to strengthen. He is 
always called to rescue in the moment of stress, and 
forgotten the moment it is over. Is it any wonder 
that he shrinks from the conflict and avers that he 
has had enough? But he always goes back, and 
always takes up the burden again, and always strikes 
his blow for a brother's good. Ungrateful Israel is 
saved by him — why ? Because he has realised 
down in the depths of his heart this is his duty. 
He cannot let father or brother go down, so he is 
the man that they ought to be, this Gideon of 
modern times, playing the game in the obscure 
corner, one of God's " cakes of barley bread." 

Now turn your eyes toward the quiet little woman 
who has come to church alone. Her husband knows 
too much to worship God on the Sabbath day ; he 
has outgrown it. This little woman knows in all its 
fulness the problem of poverty, anxiety, struggle, 
home sorrow. She has married a man in whom she 
finds it difficult to believe now as she did on the day 
she espoused him. But she tries to do it, and keeps 
a brave face to the world, and will never confess 
that she married one who was weak, but who 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 253 

appeared to be strong. If ever trouble comes to 
this family, it is the wife who bears it, not the 
husband, who says he does. Here is one who has 
not only to face the crisis when her husband lies 
down before it, but she has to keep up his spirits 
too, and renew the dying hope within him. She 
does not tell the world, and the world does not care, 
though perhaps the world would give the man what 
it thinks he deserves. This woman is neither 
beautiful nor brilliant. She will attract no attention 
in company. There is nothing showy about the 
part she plays ; but what will be the outcome ? I 
know. Her children shall rise up and call her 
blessed. The truth will out sometime where it most 
matters to be told. It is known now, if she could 
only see it, in high heaven and in the presence of 
the angels who are strong and pure, and whose 
strength and whose purity are shown in their 
sympathy with these struggling ones of earth. 
Ministering spirit below, you have a kinship with 
those ministering spirits above ! God knows the 
task that was set, and how it is being done. " A 
cake of barley bread," a single arm against a host, a 
brave battle with the inevitable end. God's ways 
shall triumph, and triumph in you. Hold on, for as 
sure as you are here this morning so surely has God 
called you to the work that you are doing, and to 
the victory you shall win. Turn back to the task 
you have left with the full assurance that so it is 
and so it must ever be. 



254 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

Now just let your thoughts turn to this boy and 
girl, for they are little more, who have come to 
church to-day to receive strength and inspiration for 
an almost impossible task to-morrow. The father 
has been taken away by the hand of death. The 
poor mother is not able to cope with the world, not 
able to think what to do or what measures to take 
to keep the old home together. So this boy and 
girl have to be father and mother to their own 
mother and to the rest — and I am painting no 
imaginary picture. I know it to be true. They 
are not versed in the ways of the world, so they are 
cheated and they are wronged and they are op- 
pressed. They are the losers, mostly, when the 
conflict comes with the hard, practised man of 
affairs. Now and then they find a friend, but they 
are learning, even so young, not to put much trust 
in human promises ; they hold good as long as they 
do not pinch the person who makes them. It is a 
hard task. Sometimes they feel as if it ought not 
to have been set them. Yet these are only tempted 
for the moment to shrink from what God has sent 
them to do. To-morrow it will be all right again. 
Back to the front ! God's " cakes of barley bread" 
thrown against a host, victory granted and assured ! 
Gideon looked just like any other Israelite, and 
amongst the people here this morning it would 
puzzle you to pick out the men who are playing the 
game as I have described it. Within as many 
minutes I sometimes talk to two or three men and 



A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 255 

try to figure out what might be if circumstances 
changed with anyone of them. One man comes with 
his complaint of the hardness of fortune, the inex- 
plicableness of fate, and excuses himself for having 
failed and gone down. Another comes, tells you 
nothing about it, but you know he has to begin 
again just where he started years ago, because of 
the mischance which has overtaken him, and which 
he never did anything to deserve. What a differ- 
ence in the two men ! I know if I put this latter 
man down in the midst of a great city, or in the 
wilds of Africa, he is not going under. He carries 
his credentials in his character. Usually the secret 
of a man's failure, though he knows it not, is not to 
be sought in any external circumstances whatever 
but in himself, and a man's success before it comes 
is guaranteed by the quality of his brain and heart. 

" Whose armour is his honest thought, 
And simple trust his utmost skill ! " 

Shall I tell you where to find the secret of 
invincible courage — intense unselfishness ? Look up 
the record of the men of faith. Have you a great 
task before you to do to-morrow ? In what spirit 
do you propose to attempt it ? Have you a duty for 
God ? With what resource will you face it ? Do 
you ask — it is very natural that you should — why all 
this? Why am I expected to do this work and 
bear that extremity of fortune ? What hope of 
success when I have done it? "A cake of barley 



256 A CAKE OF BARLEY BREAD 

bread " against an army. Yet rise up, children of 
God. Christ is with you, nay, Christ comes again 
in you to a fresh encounter with the host of evil. 
Our first hymn this morning is a glorious comment 
on this text: — 

*' Oh, wisest love ! that flesh and blood, 
Which did in Adam fail, 
Should strive afresh against their foe — 
Should strive and should prevail." 

Where am I to look for my Christ ? In heaven ? 
Well, yes, in heaven. When we see Him face to 
face we shall know something of what we have 
owed to Him all the way. But here is the place for 
the saint to look for Him now. Look within your 
own heart and you will find Him there. All that is 
best in you is Christ. The Christ divine indwells 
every one of you, you unrecognised saints of God. 
It is His work that you do ; His spirit which 
prompted it, and His victory that you are to win. 
Only " a cake of barley bread " ; only a frail hand 
and a single arm ; only a trembling, fearful heart, 
but yonder the mighty work and here, at hand, 
within, the Lord of Hosts ! 



A SINFUL GOD 



The following subject was chosen as a result of conversations with 
a number of pessimistically inclined people, whose questions involved 
the venerable problem treated in the Greek tragedies, and the Book 
of Job. In the choice of title and text I made an attempt to 
bring Christian experience to bear upon a problem to which mere 
speculation is unequal. The issue was sharply stated — too sharply 
to be at once understood by some people who were present. Vide 
the postscript which follows the sermon. 

I may remark that one of these conversationalists was Mr Hall 
Caine, whose forthcoming book, " The Prodigal Son," treats the 
same theme. 



XV 

" We make Him a liar." — i John i. 10. 

The title I have given to our subject is, I admit, a 
strange, almost an irreverent, one, but our text 
justifies the phrase if only to force an issue upon 
our consciences. It is no trifling alternative with 
which the writer of this chapter arrests our atten- 
tion by the use of this startling phrase. He places 
in bold relief what is the half-comprehended feeling 
of many whose thoughts and lives are in direct 
opposition to that view of the nature of God which 
came to us in Jesus Christ. " If we say that we 
have not sinned we make Him a liar" — there is no 
help for it. If the moral attitude of the man of the 
world is the true and wise one, be he hedonist, 
pessimist, or materialist, then God Himself must be 
a sinner, and the universe is a lie. 

Before going further, let us be sure that we have 
grasped the writer's meaning. The word " liar," as 
employed in this text, sounds to English ears a very 
strong epithet ; it has an offensive and even a con- 
temptuous significance. If you or I were to employ 
the term in addressing or describing anyone in our 
circle of acquaintance, we should expect it to be 
resented. But the offensive and contemptuous 

259 



260 A SINFUL GOD 

significance is not necessarily present in this passage. 
It really means the essential falseness of all existence. 
It could be employed even of an unconscious God. 
Suppose you imagined that the power behind pheno- 
mena is utterly unconscious of itself, and that a good 
man crushed by irresistible fate was destroyed by a 
God that did not know it when He did it, you might 
feel and say : The universe is false to my conscience ; 
conscience has bidden me do right — I have been 
destroyed by doing it : and this blind, deaf, and 
dumb God of mine did not know. But is it not 
immeasurably worse if you can bring yourself to 
feel and say that the God behind all, after all, 
knows perfectly well what He is doing, knows you 
and all about you, but is utterly indifferent as to 
what happens to you when you have served His 
immediate purpose ; you may suffer, but He cares 
not ; you may die, He has done with you ; good 
and evil, right and wrong, joy and sorrow are all one 
to Him ? " He plants His footsteps in the sea, and 
rides upon the storm." What could such atoms as 
you say to the Judge of all the earth, a Judge to 
whom right and wrong matter equally nothing? 
As John Stuart Mill says : We would arraign such 
a God — we could not help it — before the tribunal 
of our own consciences, and we should say : One 
thing at least He cannot do, He cannot compel me 
to worship Him, and if He sends me to hell for such 
a refusal, then to hell I will go. That quiet pessi- 
mist of centuries ago uttered almost a twentieth- 



A SINFUL GOD 261 

century sentiment about such an extremity when 
he wrote : — 

" We are none other than a moving row 
Of magic shadow-shapes, that come and go 

Round with the sun-illumined lantern held 
In midnight by the Master of the show." 

Here then is an issue which the writer of our 
text forces upon us. If the man who is seeking to 
follow the right that is written and proclaimed 
within his own conscience find no correspondence 
with the voice of that conscience in the world out- 
side him, then the universe is a lie. It behoves this 
generation to ponder well the declaration contained 
in these words, and every one of us must, whether 
he likes or not, take up some attitude towards them. 
To the man of indifferent life who feels he is obey- 
ing the law of the universe by living a bad life, I 
have a question to put, or, rather, I would like him 
to put it to himself : Is God a liar, or am I ? Let me 
illustrate. I doubt not I address some who feel the 
terrible pressure of the burden of the world's woe. 
Who has not done so at some time or other ? And 
who is himself so steeped in self-satisfaction as not 
to feel one pang of sympathetic sorrow for those 
less fortunately placed than myself? We may feel 
the pressure of the problem through our sympathy 
with agonising humankind, or through our own self- 
pity. Going out into my garden one morning to 
listen to the song of the birds, I found in one bush 
a little nest full of tiny mites all dead, and I could 



262 A SINFUL GOD 

not for the life of me understand why ; I knew 
that no one in my house would do such a cruel 
thing as take away the mother of those little 
ones. Presently I discovered the reason. Hang- 
ing by her feet in the garden net was the 
little songster whose home that tiny nest was. 
She had been seeking food for her little ones, and 
had been caught there and slowly destroyed. My 
imagination conjured up the scene that must have 
taken a good while to enact — the slow death, the 
longing to be free, the starving progeny, the seeming 
sinister cruelty of it all. No philosopher that has 
ever lived, any more than the weakest, smallest 
child, is able to give a full and satisfactory answer 
to the question. Why? There was epitomised 
the story of sentient life in the world, and in face 
of that tiny tragedy, I sent up my question to the 
Lord of the universe, and felt for the moment as if 
I stood upon one side and He upon another, and as 
though there were in humanity an element of pity 
which he Himself lacked, though the power was all 
His. At our young men's meeting last Thursday 
the veteran philanthropist who addressed it said, 
"I am sometimes glad I do not live in London. I 
almost think it would unman me ; there is the 
apparently hopeless sorrow of the great sunken 
masses of London to account for. There seems to 
be so little done and such a cry of agony rising from 
the abyss, that I feel if I were amongst it, in the 
presence of it, it would break my heart." I know 



A SINFUL GOD 263 

what Dr Paton meant, as most of you do. It is, as 
we read in our first lesson (Job ii.), that evil is 
stalking to and fro in the earth, and walking up and 
down in it, and God tolerates it — nay, it may be, 
ordains it. 

Yet there once stood amongst us a Being who 
had a verdict to pronounce, and, though he gave no 
full explanation, He said this concerning the great 
problem which you and I are now facing : " Are 
not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and not one of 
them falls to the ground without your Father. 
Behold the fowls of the air; they sow not, neither 
do they reap, nor gather into barns, and God 
feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" 
This same Jesus — whom some people have accused 
of looking too lightly upon the great problem of the 
woe of the world, who, as He watched the sparrow 
die at the same moment, uttered the word " Father " 
in conjunction with the tiny tragedy — this Jesus 
went to a cross for His faith ; human hands nailed 
Him there. If there ever was a vision about the 
meaning of the universe and of the nature of God, 
Jesus had it, but it did not save Him from the Cross. 
He uttered no complaint against God, and His last 
word was a word of pity for man. But this Jesus 
who thus spoke about the love of the Father for 
His children paid for it surely in His own life ; the 
dichotomy went straight through His experience. 
We feel the desperate antinomy in the experience 
of Christ as we feel it nowhere else. These con- 



264 A SINFUL GOD 

tradictions in experience are to some natures 
appalling; we feel as though harmony were im- 
possible. Some of us feel at times as if we are 
living two lives — one in which we are as Jesus, and 
the other in which we have to conform to the world's 
evil standard. This is the doctrine of Positivism — 
humanity on one side, nature on the other. Humanity 
can be considered as one, so can God ; but the real 
God, the hard God, the masterful God, is upon the 
other side, and identified with the soulless world. 

I was reading in a book called " Love and Hunger " 
which came to me the other day a statement of this 
dichotomy which probably the writer did not mean 
to make. He describes a working man sitting by 
the bedside of his little child ; he has been out of 
work weeks and months. The doctor has told him 
his child may be saved if he can give her good food 
and take her away to the seaside, and so on. The 
man cannot get the food to give the child ; the 
comforts are impossible, the seaside — you might as 
well speak of heaven. The man grows desperate as 
he sits there and watches her slipping away from 
him into the unseen. Within a few hours of the 
time when death has done his last and worst, the 
work is granted. The man feels no gratitude to 
anybody ; it comes too late. But at the very hour 
when the child is taken from him he must go out to 
earn his daily bread ; there she lies still on the bed, 
and here is he, pushing trucks about a goods yard. 
There is the problem epitomised — the two lives, the 



A SINFUL GOD 265 

one at the bedside, love that would have given itself 
in extremest sacrifice to save the little one ; the 
other conforming to that hard and terrible law. He 
had to labour and he had to suffer. 

Even greater is the question as affects the distribu- 
tion of God's judgments. Now and then a man comes 
to me and pours out his saddening tale as to the way 
in which God has judged righteous judgment concern- 
ing him; he has sinned against the light, and righteous- 
ness has been terribly vindicated in his life. But for 
one such man there are twenty men who never come. 
"The wicked flourish like a green bay tree." Here 
is a scheming monster with whom everything has 
gone well to all appearances since he began his 
lying career; why should that harpy be tolerated 
in the ranks of humanity any more than a bird 
of prey? It may be I address one who is helpless 
in the face of intolerable wrong inflicted by such a 
hand ; which of you has the better footing in life, 
you with your conscience or this man with none — ■ 
he who has been raking riches to himself ever since 
he began to think ? That is a question as between 
your conscience and your God. A friend showed to 
me some months ago a newspaper paragraph which 
concerned one of us. Putting it down on the 
table, he said, " When you consider that pungent, 
lying, loathsome statement, which only just avoids 
the law of libel, what is your first thought concern- 
ing the writer ? " I read the paragraph without a 
tremor of emotion, without any feeling either of 



266 A SINFUL GOD 

indignation or respect. I said, "Well, the man who 
wrote it probably had his bread to earn, and sold 
his soul in doing it." "Precisely," said my friend; 
"but he must have thought it would pay him to do 
it ; he must have thought the world would give 
him a chance if he did it; therefore, this expresses 
his philosophy of life. He would lie away another 
man's career, he would stab to death another man's 
peace, he would not give the treachery two thoughts 
after he had done it ; but he must believe somehow 
that the world is so made that it will let him do 
this, and the world's God is of such a kind as to 
approve it, otherwise it never would have been 
done." 

You see what I am trying to bring out. Con- 
science, even at its best, sometimes feels the terrible 
dissonance between good and evil, between the ideal 
and the real, and conscience at its worst acts as 
if the real were the evil, and as though it would 
pay to do that which is wrong, rather than to do 
that which is right. Men must believe it, or they 
would not persist in sin ; nay, they might even deny 
that there is such a thing as sin. When you see 
a man giving his life to shame and wrong you are 
tempted to believe that the law of the universe is 
the survival of the fittest — go on if you can, carve 
your way, for you must, nature will not spare you ; 
believe that the law of the universe requires you 
not to know anything about sin, not to be squeamish 
about wrong ; take things as they come, keep your 






A SINFUL GOD 267 

footing, live your life. If so, the universe is worse 
than a tragedy, it finds a place for the victorious 
lie ; good and evil it is equally indifferent to, right 
and wrong, peace and pain are confused together. 
What shall we say, then, of those who try to live 
another kind of life than this, but that if the man of 
the world has the best of it, if the hedonist comes 
off conqueror, if the materialist philosophy is the 
very truth, and God is blind and deaf and dumb, or 
worse, then the universe is a lie. 

Here, then, is the issue before us. Many of you, 
without facing things out, are living as though the 
question were already settled for you. If evil is 
stronger than good, then you are entitled to call even 
conscience a liar ; if there is nothing to vindicate the 
righteous man, then God Himself is the aider and 
abettor of sin, and is justly condemned by the very 
thing that has been held to reveal Him. Nay, if good 
has usually been on the cross, and evil on the throne, 
then even Jesus Christ, the Being of clearest moral 
vision that the world has ever known, was also the 
blindest and the most deluded, and those who have 
loved and followed and suffered and died for Him 
are of all men the most miserable and the greatest 
fools. I intentionally put the case pungently. Here 
it stands then : Jesus Christ on the one side and the 
god of the materialist and the hedonist upon the other. 
If the man of the world is right, and piety a failure, 
then Christ is a mistake, and those who follow Him 
are worse. 



268 A SINFUL GOD 

But stay : there are two things I would like to 
bring before your attention. First, supposing it 
were possible to imagine God being on one side 
and right on the other ; better perish with the right 
than succeed with such a God. We will put it that 
way. Perhaps you think I am saying something 
new, but centuries before Jesus walked on earth 
a man worked out that problem; nor is it merely 
in the book of Job. A Greek tragedian represents 
Prometheus hurled from heaven and chained to a 
rock by the king of the gods because he chose a 
right that was greater than Zeus. This god could 
not conquer ; he crushed him, but the victim had the 
victory after all. Prometheus chained to the rock 
appealed to eternal right against enthroned wrong. 
How like that is to the story of the mediaeval wor- 
shipper, who, when told that the gospel of Christ 
was only the story of the world's greatest tragedy, that 
not good, but evil, gained the victory, answered : 
"Then I had rather be in hell with Christ than in 
heaven without Him." This is the ultimatum of 
conscience. If the universe had a sinister meaning, 
and a devil were at the heart of it, better perish 
with Prometheus chained to the rock — better die 
with Jesus on the cross — than succeed by obeying 
the sinister will of such a god. 

But here is the second consideration. Thousands 
have done this very thing, and pronounced this very 
ultimatum. Men have followed the prompting of 
their highest nature with this astonishing and sub- 



A SINFUL GOD 269 

lime result : they have come to feel absolutely certain 
that conscience told them no lie, but that omnipotent God 
is righteousness, truth, and love. I am afraid that 
some will miss my meaning here. It is that when 
Calvary became the only issue out of an impossible 
situation, when good and evil were so pitted against 
each other that the good had to suffer, evil had to 
triumph, that the decision for the highest taken not 
only by the Christ, but by all who followed and 
loved Him, has led to victory after all. It is a 
sublime fact that this has meant the discovery 
that the great God is righteousness, truth, and 
love — a God that will by no means clear the 
guilty. " The Lord executeth righteousness and 
judgment for all that are oppressed." " Like as a 
father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them 
that fear Him." " For God so loved the world that 
He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever 
believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal 
life." Ponder this well, all you whose lives are so 
ordered as to "make Him a liar." Can you stand in 
the judgment, not the judgment that is afar off, but 
the judgment that ever proceeds? Your life is 
registering its own decrees. Is evil gain or loss? 
Were it well to serve it or defy it ? I ask you to 
appeal to the experience of the man of faith in any 
age. At that meeting last Thursday to which I 
have already referred one of our deacons spoke and 
gave us this piece of experience ; it arrested my 
attention instanter — in fact, I may say this sermon 



270 A SINFUL GOD 

came out of it : — He said it had often struck him as 
an appalling thing that young men of his acquaint- 
ance were sometimes willing and ready to avow that 
the determination to get on meant the sacrifice of 
moral principle. They would speak in this way : 
"The world is so ordered to-day that the man 
who would succeed must have money — money I must 
have ! The man who has none is thought little of 
to-day ; therefore I mean to get it. If it is wealth 
that leads to power, and wealth that spells success, 
I cannot afford to be without it. I will get it, 
honestly if I can ; but if I cannot, still I will get it." 
This, said my deacon, struck him as being a ghastly 
sign of the times — that a man should so present 
the alternative to himself and so decide. He was 
not speaking from imagination, but from what he 
knows well. There are men who, whether they 
confess it or not, have deliberately made this 
choice, which I should call a pact with the forces 
of evil. 

You see what such a man says to himself. It is 
not a question of sin. He would not acknowledge 
its existence ; sin can only be recognised when 
righteousness is enthroned. Righteousness may not 
vindicate itself at once, but a man will not acknow- 
ledge his sin who is obeying what he calls the law 
of the universe, a necessity imposed upon all flesh. 
He says : " You must live, you must succeed if you 
can ; you cannot afford to be squeamish. Do not 
parade your sympathy ; this world is not a place for 



A SINFUL GOD 271 

sentiment. Get on, honestly if you can, but get on 
anyhow ; and when the time comes when you must 
turn to the left and win success, or tarn to the right 
and become a failure, do not fear or hesitate to go 
to the left." You see what you have done; you 
would not acknowledge it, but the word " sin " has 
no entrance here or any stake at all. Be it so. 
You have taken your choice ; you have " made Him 
a liar," and, not only so, but all the experience of 
saints and martyrs since time began. You have 
taken your stand with a sorry crew — those who 
prevail for the moment, but to-morrow are dismissed 
in ignominy from before the face of God. 

You, then, who dread life, who are tired of it 
and suffer under it, have you been to Christ with 
your trouble, with your problem ? Has He laid His 
healing touch upon you ? Have you anything to 
yield up to Him ? Then fear nothing else. " If we 
confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive 
us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteous- 
ness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him 
a liar." If He cannot keep you in peace and safety 
once you have chosen Him, then, in the language 
of our text, He is a liar ; but can He — does He ? 
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so whom He has 
delivered out of the hands of the enemy. " Many 
are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord 
delivereth him out of them all." " Sorrow endureth 
for a night, joy cometh in the morning." This, then, 
is the meaning of life. I am glad that God has 



272 A SINFUL GOD 

made it no child's play ; there is many a twentieth- 
century Job who has had to face these issues and 
come through, walking by faith — the faith that never 
loses grip of the hand of righteousness. It is the 
righteous man who knows that God is true. " There 
hath not failed one word of all His good promise." 
I have no fear or hesitation in stating this alterna- 
tive: Either God is a liar, evil man, or you are; 
either righteousness is the last word of the universe, 
and is one with the love of the All-Father, or else 
your life is at one with the law of evil. But if the 
Cross of Calvary is really the way to the throne of 
His glory, you are condemned even now. But you 
who have served truth and suffered for it, you who 
have been nailed on a cross of your own for trying 
feebly and in a corner to serve the same great law of 
righteousness, you who have come to Christ, turn- 
ing your back upon evil as you turned your face to 
Him, you need have no fear: " Yea, let God be 
true and every man a liar." When the heart of 
a righteous man speaks true, it knows Him to be 
the Father and Redeemer of us all. But beware, 
ye workers of iniquity. " Turn ye, why will ye 
die ? " The life that is raised against God is fore- 
doomed. His righteousness will dash it to pieces 
like the potter's clay. 

A Question Answered 

Before announcing his text on Sunday evening 
Mr Campbell said : — 



A SINFUL GOD 273 

" Someone who appears to have been present at 
the service this morning has sent in to me the follow- 
ing question, to be answered if possible from the 
pulpit to-night. I could hardly undertake to answer 
in the pulpit every question that comes to me, but as 
this arrives so soon after my teaching of this morning 
I think it is well worth a word. 

ac Will Mr Campbell kindly explain why the 
power to do evil is greater than the power to do 
good ; or, in other words, why evil is stronger or 
more powerful than God ? ' 

"The answer to the question is that evil is not 
stronger or more powerful than God, though it may 
often seem to be so. Even human experience at its 
highest is a constant denial of any such pessimistic 
creed. There are men here to-night, I do not doubt, 
who feel in their hearts, and sometimes say with their 
lips, that this is a world in which it is easier to do 
wrong than to do right. To the flesh it may be, 
but there is something within every man which in 
the very moment of his sin informs him of a larger 
and a purer and a higher life, and in so doing calls 
him towards it and condemns him for failing. 
Every person here must admit that. Moreover, 
in my teaching this morning I tried to show to you 
by two parallel statements what Christian experience 
has to say upon this point. Supposing, as in the 
Greek tragedy, you are, like Prometheus, chained 
to the rock for having dared to do right, having 
given yourself to a noble cause and suffered defeat 



274 A SINFUL GOD 

thereby ; supposing, I say, that the universe was so 
made that you had to be chained to the rock, like 
Prometheus, or nailed upon the Cross of Christ, 
better go, then, and suffer in defiance of an evil god 
than succeed by obeying a sinister law. There is 
something in the human heart which says, c Better 
be crucified with Christ, if that were the very last 
word that the universe ever uttered, than obey a 
god whose name and nature are wrong.' 

" But, secondly, the very men who have done 
this are the men who have discovered for us and 
written large upon the skies of time the truth that 
to him who suffers for the good there enters the 
confidence that God is good. The men who have 
gone to the stake for right, the men who have been 
tortured for the sake of truth, the men who have 
been heroic in the world's great affairs, defying bad 
humanity itself for the sake of something which is 
eternal, have by that very process and that very 
experience become convinced of the fact that omni- 
potence was upon their side after all. God and 
righteousness and truth and love are one, and the 
men who have gone to Calvary in that belief have 
not doubted that it was so. And it will be so for 
every man in this place who dares to venture his 
life and his career upon it to-morrow. You will not 
be allowed to live and to die without the conscious- 
ness that you are on the side of God." 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 



It often falls to my lot to have to reason with young men who are 
agnostically inclined. When such a young man is unteachable I 
leave him alone, feeling certain that time will modify his self-con- 
fidence ; but if along with his agnosticism there goes a wish to 
render obedience to the best, there are many ways of helping him. 
This sermon was designed to show that not only is humanity com- 
pelled to be agnostic — in the literal meaning of the term — con- 
cerning by far the greater number of the questions that even a child 
can ask about the universe, but that this ignorance of ours has a 
certain moral value ; it gives us an opportunity for noble living amid 
things the full meaning of which we see not. This is the way in 
which character is made. It startled some of my young men to be 
told that in this sense I was not only an agnostic myself, but that 
every Christian must be, and that even the Christian's Lord was 
not exempt from the reality of this experience. It is so often and 
so freely asserted that our blessed Lord had no mysteries to face, 
that He is made to seem an unreal and unhelpful Being to men of 
this generation who are trying to follow Him. The mistaken 
abuse I received for this sermon, from good people who never saw 
the point of it, was more than balanced by the good work it did 
among my own young men. It made Jesus real to them, and 
taught them to see that a man's worth consists in the way he deals 
with that corner of his life in which there is no room for doubt, 
and no excuse to be agnostic. 



XVI 



"But of that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in 
heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." — Mark xiii. 32. 

If one were in search of a text with which to 
testify to the genuineness of the Gospel narrative 
he could not select a better than this one. It is, 
indeed, remarkable, in regard to early Christian 
records as a whole, that the further we get away 
from apostolic times the less simple and credible 
are the accounts of the various writers. When we 
compare the gospels with sub-apostolic narratives 
of what profess to be incidents in the life of Jesus 
we are struck by the naturalness and spontaneity 
of the former as against the turgidness and miracle- 
mongering of the latter. The gospels are probable 
from their very simplicity, just as the sub-apostolic 
records are largely improbable because they lack 
that quality. In the gospels Jesus appears as a 
simple yet sublimely impressive figure, while in sub- 
apostolic literature He is anything but that. This 
text, then, is one of many which do something to 
establish the genuineness of the Gospel records ; 
for in sub-apostolic times it would have been added 
to or explained away. Here in St Mark's Gospel 
it stands just as Jesus spoke it, and apparently the 

277 



278 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

utterance is meant as an acknowledgment of His 
ignorance of some things. 

There is in many quarters to-day a tendency like 
that of sub-apostolic times, a reluctance to admit 
that our Lord could be ignorant of anything. 
People who hold that view fail to see that in so 
doing they destroy the humanity of Jesus, and 
therefore His value for us. What avail His struggle 
and sorrow if He knew all about their meaning, 
and why they came, and the issue thereof? His 
life and work would be unreal if we could compel 
ourselves to believe that. No; as He here Him- 
self asserts, His consciousness of His destiny and 
His mission was limited. In many things Jesus 
was the Child of His time, and I will mention some 
of them. For one thing, there is no reason for us 
to believe that Jesus thought anything other than 
that Moses wrote the Pentateuch from the first 
chapter to the last, and that all the other authors 
of the Old Testament books were as traditionally 
described and named. I remember once, in Oxford 
days, hearing a popular preacher, who came to the 
University city with the special object of over- 
throwing, as he called it, or attempting to over- 
throw, the work of one Biblical scholar of eminence 
— Canon Driver — and the way he proposed to do 
it was this : " Jesus said Moses wrote the Levitical 
code ; therefore he did write it, otherwise our Lord 
is not what He professed to be, and our Lord is 
not divine." The good man was perfectly genuine 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 279 

and perfectly sincere, but, as you can see for your- 
selves, his argument was not necessarily sound — 
far from it. For, on our Lord's own showing, 
there were some things He did not know; and 
this may, with all reasonableness, have been one 
of them. "Who wrote the Pentateuch or who wrote 
the Psalms was not the question that Jesus came 
to settle, nor ths information that Jesus came to 
give; neither should it ever be, in the life of any 
rational man, or of any Christian, a question of 
primary importance. The questions of primary im- 
portance lie deeper than that, deeper than the 
authenticity of this or that book, but not deeper 
than the great moral facts of our being. The Lord 
hath written His law within our hearts. What Jesus 
came to reveal no man stands in doubt of who looks 
at the life of Jesus and tries to conform himself to it. 
Further, Jesus was a Child of the time, in 
all probability, in that He assigned causes for 
disease which we do not assign to-day. Epilepsy, 
for example, was believed by everybody in His 
time and among His countrymen to be demon- 
possession. It may have been — there is nothing 
asserted to the contrary — that Jesus thought so 
too. Again, there is no reason to think that He 
knew all the facts concerning the structure of the 
physical universe. It is marvellous how He avoided 
error concerning these things ; but there is no 
indication that Jesus foresaw the astronomical dis- 
coveries of a later day, nor did He give any hint 



2 8o THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

that He thought about them. In political history 
the knowledge of Jesus appears to have been con- 
fined to His own people and to the influence of 
Rome upon them. He never foresaw England ; He 
never said a word about the British Empire. He 
never seems to have looked much further than His 
own generation, as the chapter that we read for 
our lesson (Mark xiii.) shows. Yet, in the pro- 
vidence of God, England has had a place to fill in 
the world relatively as great as that of Rome, and 
her mission is not terminated yet. Lastly, Jesus 
was the Child of His time, in that He not only 
anticipated a speedy end of the world, but that 
it would be of a cataclysmal character : hence our 
text. "This generation," He says in the context, 
" shall not pass till all these things be done." It 
is common knowledge that the Christian Church 
in general in the first age expected a speedy coming 
of the Messiah and a speedy end of the world. 
But Jesus did not come as was expected. The 
end of the world is not yet. Every week some 
fresh prophet professes to find from certain portents 
the exact date when this earth and the heavens are 
to be dissolved and the elements melted with fervent 
heat; but so many have been their false alarms, 
so numerous their disappointments, that I think 
we may take it for granted that the end will not 
come quite so soon as any person in this generation 
believes, any more than it came in the generation 
to which Jesus belonged. But I say it is clear 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 281 

from this chapter that Jesus Himself anticipated 
the end sooner than the facts have shown to 
be the case. 

But all this only serves to bring Him very near 
to us, without dimming in the slightest the beauty 
of His spiritual vision or diminishing one iota His 
moral pre-eminence. It only showed that Jesus 
possessed no dual consciousness. He could not 
be at once finite and infinite — Himself and some- 
body else. He was Jesus. He brought to us 
the manhood of God, and everyone of you who 
is trying to live the life of Jesus in the spirit 
and strength of Jesus is showing forth the same 
thing. For God is not something apart from 
humanity. He is humanity, and infinitely more. 
All that God was in humanity, that Jesus was, 
and is. He consistently represented humanity at 
its highest, and thus showed it to be in its essence 
divine. 

" Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours and 
mine. 
Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine." 

We may, therefore, with reverence, regard this 
text as illustrating the agnosticism of Jesus. 

Agnosticism was a word, coined, I believe, by 
the late Professor Huxley, to express a certain 
mental attitude towards questions insoluble at 
present by the human intellect, but with which 
religion professes to deal. I do not mention the 
term with any intention of attacking it — far from 



282 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

it. I believe it has done a necessary work. Indeed, 
I would like to show that there are some things 
upon which young men can afford to be agnostic, 
and some upon which every man must be agnostic, 
and for that we have our Lord's own warrant. It 
was the late Mr Herbert Spencer who, in his 
"First Principles," defined the basis of agnosticism 
thus : " The power behind phenomena is utterly 
inscrutable." There are people here who do not 
think that proposition ought to pass unchallenged. 
Yet " God's ways are in the sea." The Christian 
could say that, and is so far an agnostic. " Canst 
thou by searching find out God ? " The answer 
is, No. But this Jesus of whom I have been 
speaking addressed Himself directly to the power 
behind the phenomena, as though He knew some- 
thing concerning it. He said: "I thank Thee, 
O Father, that Thou hast hid these things from 
the wise and understanding, and hast revealed them 
unto babes." The power behind phenomena, if 
it is to be revealed at all, must be revealed to a 
certain quality of heart rather than to a certain 
quality of mind. This quality of heart Jesus ex- 
hibited at its fullest and best, and you and I may 
partake of it. There are some things that we 
can come to know concerning our being, and our 
destiny, and our place in the heart of God, although 
we may be in the dark about all things else. 

No doubt I address not a few who are in the 
particular mental mood which has conventionally 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 283 

been called agnosticism. In a congregation so 
large as this, containing so many young men, it 
is impossible to suppose that every person accepts 
the orthodox and conventional view of the person 
of Jesus and the doctrines of Christianity. You 
do nothing of the kind. I do not think any the 
worse of you if you have faced your difficulties 
fairly and bravely. In your case, in all probability, 
what you call agnosticism simply means a sort of 
religious uncertainty. u How do you know?" would 
be the question you would address to me if I 
were to make any very definite assertion concerning 
God, human destiny, immortality. u Prove your case." 
Now, I want to show that we are all, more or less, 
compelled to assume yourpresentattitude, only, where- 
as you take it about the deepest things, some of us 
have come to see that we cannot afford to take it 
about those things, and that experience justifies us in 
taking a more confident, more optimistic attitude 
toward the great questions of human life. Thus, 
we are all compelled to be agnostics, of a kind and 
up to a certain point — I am not afraid of the word. 
Men were agnostics before the word was coined, 
but they did not know they were. I would like 
to show you that your value as a man depends 
upon the quality of your agnosticism ; your merit 
before God depends upon whether you are an 
agnostic in the sense that Jesus would approve or 
whether you are not. 

You remember, probably, the story of the con- 



284 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

version of King Edwin of Northumbria. It was a 
long time before Huxley's days, but there was some 
agnosticism taught by a statesman in King Edwin's 
wooden hall when the missionaries of Augustine 
came to the northern capital and waited before the 
Saxon monarch and his lords. At first they were 
inclined to repudiate him and his doctrines. At 
last one of the council arose and spoke thus : a Thou 
knowest, O King, that oftentimes on a winter 
evening, when we are assembled within this dimly 
lighted hall to do the business of our people, a swallow 
will come in from the night and pass through the 
hall and out at the further door — from darkness 
into darkness again. So it is with the human soul. 
We come we know not whence ; we go we know 
not whither. If, therefore, these new teachers can 
tell us aught concerning whence we come and 
whither we go, let us hear them." Great events 
proceed from small causes. It may have been in 
the providence of God that that speech that night 
had something to do with your Christianity and 
mine to-day. Yet we are just in the same position 
intellectually as that Saxon speaker was who stood 
before King Edwin concerning the same questions 
that he raised. He was an agnostic, though he 
did not use the word. So are we, and yet we may 
be Christians notwithstanding. Do we know 
whence we come ? Some preach reincarnation, but 
most of us would brush aside the suggestion that 
we have ever lived before. Whether we brush it 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 285 

aside or not, we cannot prove either yea or nay ; 
we have to hold our judgment in suspense in a 
question of that kind. The question first to be 
settled is, what to do with our destiny while we are 
here, how to prepare for the destiny that awaits us. 
Can you tell whither you go ? Not a few in this 
congregation are not at all sure that there is any 
life beyond the grave. They wish it could be 
proven. So do I. But we can do no more than 
infer it from the moral constitution of the universe. 
If to-morrow you could fling wide open the portals 
of the unseen, you would not necessarily make 
better one man on the whole globe ; rather, you 
would probably give opportunity for the formation 
of some syndicate to exploit it. You would make 
no man, necessarily, feel that he must be a better 
man, a nobler man, than he was before. Here, 
then, we stand just in the position of the Saxon 
lord who advised King Edwin that we know not 
whence we come, and we know not for certain, in 
the fashion of scientific truth, whither we go. We 
can but fall back on the position of Tennyson, which 
is the position of every Christian too, and say : — 

" My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is. ,, 

Human nature refuses to believe that grim alter- 
native. The moral argument for immortality is the 
only one that is much worth while. We are 



286 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

agnostic, then — compelled to be agnostic — in the 
sense, that we cannot prove, by demonstration, that 
there is either heaven or hell. 

Again, we are agnostic concerning the staggering 
problem of the existence of evil. By evil I mean 
both sin and suffering. As I came down to the 
church to-night I saw the newspaper placards about 
the battle which has been raging for days in the far 
East, and is not over yet. This is what the headlines 
said : — 

RUSSIAN ROUT 



HORRIBLE CARNAGE 



RIVERS CHOKED WITH DEAD 

If you will allow your imagination to rest upon those 
phrases for a moment, and to translate you to the 
scene where those events are taking place, you will 
have a problem to which no philosopher has ever yet 
been equal. In its presence everyone has to hold 
his judgment in suspense. He can give no opinion 
as to the why and the wherefore of these things 
in a world which is said to be ruled by divine 
love, the governance of which is righteousness. 
But two days ago I read in the newspaper some- 
thing that would touch some of us British people 
more nearly still. A young couple, father and 
mother, were putting their only two children 
to bed. One of them, a little fellow, leaping 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 287 

out of his father's arms at the top of the stairs, 
fell to the bottom, and was killed. His mother 
rushed from where she was bathing the baby 
to the spot where the tragical fall took place, and, 
in her agony, casting herself upon her baby boy, 
forgot the other. When she returned the poor 
little mite was drowned. I see you feel just as I 
felt when I read that. There is something inexplic- 
able there. None of us can see any possible good 
in a discipline of that kind — a horrible, crushing 
calamity. Poor father ! Poor mother ! They must 
be sufficient for each other to-night, for the veil has 
dropped — dropped from the hand of death — not only 
between them and their children, but between them 
and their God. On a larger scale similar tragedies 
are taking place everywhere. It may be questioned 
whether there is anything more tragic than the 
bereavement caused by the shattering of the bonds 
of love. It is just because we are made capable of 
affection that pain can strike so deep. Who can 
answer the problem which is raised thus ? None of 
us. You can but stand silent in the presence of 
that awful fact to which all flesh is heir. 

Outside of this church there is a murder going on 
somewhere. You will see it told in the papers to- 
morrow. Have you an answer for the problem of 
human depravity? Nay, you need not go outside 
the church. Stay here. What burdens have been 
brought into this place ? What awful resolves, it 
may be, have been taken by some worshipper ere he 



288 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

entered the door! What anguish and distress of 
mind, what a poignant experience is someone's who 
has come to rest for a little while in the company of 
his fellows and to try and forget ! Oh the horrible 
pit and the miry clay ! You are very quiet as I 
speak. Some of you, the youngest of you, have 
learned to be quiet in the presence of some of the 
dread things of life ; for, young as you are, it may 
be hope is gone and you are of those whose lot is 
cast — 

" With those who watch but work no more, 
Who gaze on life but live no more." 

Do you know the meaning of it all? I do not. 
Sometimes I think I can lift a corner of the curtain. 
There is one thing — one thing only — which gives 
hope in the midst of trial, and it is the experience of 
the Saviour. He knows, even in sight of the Cross 
and in spite of the shame, yea, in the midst of the 
agony, and in face of the tomb, that it is well with 
him who suffers for righteousness. The word has 
been spoken from the unseen to the deepest in His 
own soul. There has been nothing noble but its 
price was paid in pain ; there has been no manhood 
worthy of the name but it was born in the furnace. 
Were this all, it would be poor comfort, even 
then ; but I must take you further with One who 
had a higher vision than mine. These things were 
not hidden from the Great Agnostic in Whose 
name we are gathered. What had Jesus to say 
about them? Almost nothing at all. Nothing? 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 289 

— nothing about whence we came and whither we 
go? nothing about meaningless agony? nothing 
about human depravity, and the cause thereof, 
and the end thereof? — nothing? No; nothing 
that would be evidence in the laboratory, but much 
that is evidence to conscience. Jesus never raised 
the question of the goodness of God ; He took 
that for granted, and lived His life accordingly. 
Jesus took for granted the essential Tightness of 
God's doing. His pure soul reflected the Father's 
love, and the Cross could not destroy His faith in 
it. Jesus never discussed whether a man had lived 
before or should live again. Of Himself He said, 
"Before Abraham was, I am." To those who 
drew near to Him He assumed the eternal destiny 
of every soul, and it is to pure and holy lives that 
the same revelation is made to-day. It is not 
necessarily the people who have suffered most that 
are the most faithless. Now and then you meet 
a man who has been turned bitter by his woe ; 
now and then you meet a lonely soul who has 
lost faith in the kindness of the Father because she 
has been robbed of love. But I think I can say 
that those I have known who have suffered most, 
upon whom God has laid the heaviest burden, who 
have had sorrow heaped on sorrow, agony added 
to agony, till Nature could bear no more, have not 
uncommonly been those who stood nearest to the 
heart of Christ, those who have gazed most trust- 
fully into the Father's face. There is a phenomenon 

T 



290 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

for you : the person who lives the Christ-like life 
in the atmosphere of loving trust, somehow, in spite 
of the agony — my phrase is not strong enough 
— even because of the agony, transforms the Cross 
into a crown of glory. The sufferers know not the 
meaning of what they have to endure. "I was 
dumb, I opened not my mouth, because Thou didst 
it." Yet listen to the affirmation of the man of 
faith: " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
Him." What kind of man does that kind of 
agnosticism make ? I challenge you to tell me 
whether Huxley's kind has done better. Has it 
done as well? 

Now, before I close — I see my time is gone, 
and I have not said half I wanted to say to 
these young men before me, to whom my heart 
goes out in brotherly sympathy — before I close, I 
leave this with you. It is no begging of the ques- 
tion or dodging of the issue. That I say I know. 
Agnostic you must be, but not all the way round. 
There are some things you do know, even if no 
preacher ever uttered them, and no man of science 
considered them. What kind of life are you living 
amid the issues that you clearly understand ? In 
the business where you get your living you will 
meet with men who are systematic liars, scheming 
for their own ends. You say, "It is a bad social 
system, but we cannot help it ; business is business. 
In the present it is nothing better than barbarism. 
We are longing, yearning for a better day, 'when 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 291 

men shall brothers be ' in the market as they are at 
the fireside ; but at the present there must be falsity, 
hypocrisy, suspicion," Don't believe it. The social 
order will never change until some have been cruci- 
fied — it may be you are one amongst the number. 
You dealt with a man yesterday who would lie his 
soul away to gain a sovereign. You know he will 
get the better of you by sharp practice if he cannot 
by fair. The motto of many a successful man of 
business is not better than this: u Get there, fairly 
if you can, but get there." You have your place to 
make, and to keep when you make it. Well, now, 
if I were to say to that man who yesterday got the 
better of you, and whose whole policy and maxim 
and order of life are just what he treated you to 
yesterday, "I know something better for you," and 
I preached unto him Christ as Paul would have done 
it, he might laugh in my face. " All very well," he 
would say, " perhaps there never was a Jesus." 
Well, I might manage to answer that. I could prove 
the historicity of Jesus as easily as I could prove 
that of Lord Palmerston, and the evidence is just as 
good. " Prove then, that He said what is written 
in the gospels." Very well ; I am willing to accept 
that challenge, too, for if " Jesus " did not speak 
the message attributed to Him, the man who did is 
my Christ. "Then prove that He lives." I cannot. 
He is worthy to live ; He is worthy to reign ; and 
the life that is lived along that line is a triumphant 
life, and the man who has come to that ideal never 



292 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

finds fault with his destiny, however hard it may be. 
He sees but a little way ; but that is enough. These 
are not the men who have shrunk from arduous 
issues nor strenuous conflicts ; look history through, 
and you will see them among the highest and the 
noblest of the sons of men. Agnostics, but agnostics 
like the author of the hymn who wrote: — 

" Keep Thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
The distant scene ; one step enough for me." 

Agnostics, if you like, about nineteen-twentieths 
of the facts of life; but about the remaining 
twentieth no compromise with conscience. Again, 
can you afford to be agnostic concerning, let me 
say it, the worth of womanly purity — your sister, 
your mother, the woman whom you hope to make 
your wife ? Give a logical reason, a scientific 
reason ; we will have it that way. Why should 
you feel the blush of shame on your cheek and 
the mounting of indignation to your face if you 
hear a man say a word about these sacred names 
which would tend to diminish your reverence for 
them and the respect which is their due? Why 
is it? You will have to go deeper than scalpels 
and microscopes can take you to find that. It is 
written deep down in your heart by the finger of 
God. He was there to write it Himself. It was 
from the divine that that sentiment sprang. 

Listen, then, you who are trying to live your 
life without Christ, who confess yourselves to be 



THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 293 

without a working faith. You are not quite so 
bereft as you thought. Can you go no further? 
Can you afford to be a liar? Can you afford to 
be unclean? Agnostic in a good many things, you 
will pause before you are agnostic concerning the 
things of truth and purity and right, the noblest 
manhood. And when next your scoffer says, " Who 
knows whether there be a Christ and a heaven ? " 
answer thus : " Are you taking the way to find 
out?" u He that willeth to do the will of My 
Father which is in heaven, he shall know of the 
teaching." Live like a man, a true man and a 
brave, in the region where you cannot afford to be 
agnostic. You will find that region is a little 
larger by the time we meet again. 

** Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone." 

Listen, my friends and brothers ! I am taking 
you back to Jesus again. He was agnostic, just as 
you have to be, about some of the most obtrusive 
things of life. Jesus could no more have answered 
some of the questions I have mentioned to you 
than you can answer them yourself. What will 
take place within the next five minutes of your 
life? I do not know. What will be the 
next word the preacher shall speak? You 
do not know. What is there waiting for you — 
black or golden fate — to-morrow? I do not know; 



294 THE AGNOSTICISM OF JESUS 

you do not know. Is it death? is it life? is it 
sorrow? is it joy? We do not know. We are 
agnostics in these things and things like them, but 
so was Jesus. But, as a saint of God sang just 
before he went out to death — - 

" I know not what awaits me, 
God kindly veils mine eyes." 

I rest upon the eternal purpose. It is well with 
those who put their trust in Him, well with those 
who seek to walk uprightly. The man who is living 
a pure life in the things of every day does know 
something then about the meaning of life and its 
call to him. Though it be shrouded in mystery, it 
" means intensely and means good " ; and to face it 
as Jesus faced it, and live it as Jesus lived it, means 
that the things we know by being true and faithful 
enable us to wait the revelation of the rest without 
darkness or dread. " I know whom I have believed, 
and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which 
I have committed unto Him against that day." " We 
know that all things work together for good to them 
that love God, to them who are the called according 
to His purpose." 



ONENESS WITH GOD 



This sermon was asked for by some of the young men who had 
been helped and set thinking by the previous one on the Agnos- 
ticism of Jesus. It speaks for itself. 



XVII 

•' I and My Father are one." — St John x. 30. 

These words of Jesus are in a sense a summary of the 
Fourth Gospel. This is what the gospel is about, 
and the text is the reason why it was written. The 
writer himself tells us so. " These things are written 
that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son 
of God, and that, believing, ye might have life 
through His name." What is chiefly remarkable 
about the words of our text is that nearly everyone 
who hears them thinks he knows what they mean, 
and yet their simplest interpretation is not the one 
that is usually put upon them first. It is strange, 
too, that the meaning which constitutes their chiefest 
value is the one that is usually passed over. 

What, then, are we to say this sentence does 
mean? I put the question to you, and no doubt 
you are answering it mentally, somewhat in anticipa- 
tion of what is to follow. What can they mean ? 
One might say, when Jesus declared, "I and My 
Father are one," He affirms an eternal fact, for He 
Himself is the Eternal Son of the Eternal Father, 
the express image of God, or, as the Shorter Cate- 
chism has it, u There are three persons in the 
Godhead ; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; 

297 



298 ONENESS WITH GOD 

and these three are one God, the same in substance, 
equal in power and glory." Or, as an even better- 
known creed has it, u There are not three incompre- 
hensibles . . . but one." I say everybody, or nearly 
everybody, on hearing the words of our text, would 
at once give, in conventional language, in the lan- 
guage of someone else and written ages ago, some 
such explanation of its meaning. Do you think we 
have made it clear when we have used all these 
words about it ? We have done the very opposite. 
We have wrapped it up in symbols, but we have not 
come to close quarters with it and gripped it. There 
is nothing more certain than that Jesus employed 
these words, not in their metaphysical sense, but in 
their moral sense. It is true they cannot have a 
moral without a metaphysical meaning, but it is the 
moral meaning upon which Jesus laid stress, and I do 
not think that those who heard Him mistook His 
meaning. He took pains to show just what it was. 
It is strange, indeed, that the context of this sen- 
tence is so seldom quoted. " Jesus answered them, 
Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods ? 
If He called them gods unto whom the word of God 
came, and the Scripture cannot be broken ; Say ye 
of Him, whom the Father hath sanctified and sent 
into the world, Thou blaspheme st ; because I said, I 
am the Son of God ? If I do not the Works of My 
Father, believe Me not." These are the evidences 
of My oneness with Him. 

If I may venture to paraphrase the sacred text, I 



ONENESS WITH GOD 299 

should say His remonstrance in every-day English 
meant something like this. " Why are you so sur- 
prised ? Why so angry that I have said, i I and My 
Father are one ? ' If all the prophets, if all the royal 
men of history, if all the noble ones of earth have 
deserved to have applied to them this phrase, I said, 
'Ye are gods,' do you not think that I, by My very 
credentials, have some right to use the phrase like- 
wise? If they are gods, I do not say even so much." 
For Jesus never in so many words said, "lam God." 
If we have affirmed it, and we cannot help it, it was 
not because He claimed it, it was because men read 
Him, His credentials were clear by what He was. 
They confirmed His utterance. " I and My Father 
are one." I say it is strange that the context is 
never quoted, for by this assertion Jesus claimed 
divinity for manhood. 

Still further, He asserted that everything that was 
good witnessed for human oneness in God. " If any 
royal men deserved the title Godlike, then," said 
Jesus, u surely I may claim, if I do always the things 
which please Him, oneness with My Father." All 
discussion as to His metaphysical status is beside the 
mark. His credentials were in the purity and noble- 
ness of His character and work. He said well, 
" For which of these works do you stone Me ? " He 
was and is one with the Father in spirit and purpose, 
heart and will. 

You will observe that I have left a question un- 
discussed, the pre-existence of Christ I have not 



3 oo ONENESS WITH GOD 

mentioned; His lordship, other than in the moral 
sense, I have not touched. Jesus may have been 
from all eternity at the right hand of God. He 
never thrust that fact upon His hearers, but what 
He did press upon their attention and seek to enforce 
by the lesson of His life was this — humanity is meant 
to rest in the bosom of God. It should be true of 
all men, and He came to help to make it true, that 
they could say, as He said, " I and My Father are 
one." Learn, then, that the reason why these words 
were ever spoken was to lead mankind to realise its 
oneness with God. For this we were created, and 
to this we must attain. When we shall see Jesus, 
as I trust we shall all see Him, face to face, we shall 
never ask the question, the thought will not occur 
to us whether He is man or God. The absurdity of 
the inquiry by that time will be clear. No such 
question, I say, will occur to us. No creed will rise 
to our lips. It is just as true of heaven to say 
there shall be no creed there as to say there 
shall be no night there. Creed will have become 
experience, and faith will have become sight. It is 
related, I think of Charles Lamb (I speak subject to 
correction), that, in company with some others, when 
the person of Christ and His status in the ranks of 
humanity was under consideration, Lamb spoke thus 
— " If any of the worthies of antiquity, a Socrates, 
a Shakespeare, a Luther, were to enter this room, we 
should all stand, but if that Other came, we should 
all kneel." You feel, without my having to add one 



ONENESS WITH GOD 301 

rhetorical word, the irresistible, invincible truth of 
that assertion. If Jesus Christ stood where I stand 
now — and I verily believe He does — and our eyes 
were opened to see Him, the King in His beauty, 
not a scoffer in this Church would curl his lip in the 
presence of the Son of God. For since that day 
when the Jews took up stones to stone Him, humanity 
has come to know what Christ really was, and the 
riddle they could not read, and the glory they could 
not see, and the moral grandeur to which they were 
not susceptible, are revealed plainly to the gaze of 
all men. It now knows what Jesus was, and the 
question of His metaphysical origin and the question 
of His status in the Godhead never would have been 
debated if it had not been for His moral value to 
mankind. For the present, then, His value to us is 
that in Him we can see what God is. To all eternity 
you and I may be growing in the knowledge of God's 
ways, you will never have to grow any wiser in the 
knowledge of God's heart once you have seen Jesus. 
We know Him now for what He is. We realise the 
goodness of the Father in the transparency of the 
character of the Christ. And still more — have you 
ever realised it? — it is a creed that is worth your 
while — to all eternity you will never find that God 
the Father is any better than was the earthly Jesus. 
That is the value of the Christ, and what He came 
to reveal, and our souls respond to it now with earnest- 
ness and humility — His oneness with God in heart, 
in purpose, mind, and will. " He that hath seen Me 



3 o2 ONENESS WITH GOD 

hath seen the Father." U I and My Father are 
one." 

This, I say, is to be your destiny too. God and 
humanity are one. God is infinitely more, but He 
has never withdrawn from your life, or else there 
would be no life at all. Some day the will of 
which you boast yourself now, the freedom that 
you enjoy and misuse, will be gone, for if you have 
learned Christ, all your goodness will be spon- 
taneous, you will not pause to consider or even 
struggle before you do the right, and when you 
have done it there will be no question of your will 
and God's will. It will all be His. Glad freedom 
when will is dead ! When sin is done away and 
time shall be no more, men will no longer talk about 
humanity and divinity; but God, heaven, mankind 
will be at one, and you shall say, even as Christ has 
been teaching you to say, " I and my Father are one." 

As I was on my way to Africa, I heard a little 
fellow pestering his mother to tell him when he 
would see the sea. She was pointing it out to him, 
"There is the sea, my child, there is the sea, all 
around the ship." That did not satisfy the little 
man. Pointing with his finger, now north, now 
south, now east, now west, he kept on asking, "Is 
that the sea, is that the sea, mamma?" And her 
answer was invariably, with the patience of mother- 
hood, "Yes, that is the sea." The puzzled ex- 
pression on the little fellow's face told me what was 
in his mind. To him that was only water, and he 



ONENESS WITH GOD 303 

wondered when the point would come when that 
which was distinctively the sea, the unfamiliar com- 
pared with that with which he had been familiar all 
his life, would come into his vision. He could not 
see the ocean for the water. There is an old saying 
that sometimes we cannot see the wood for the 
trees. The little child who picks a daisy may need 
to be reminded that it is a flower. Is it a daisy or 
a flower, is it water or the sea, the trees or the 
forest, humanity or God? So may He grant that 
you and I may live the life in which the very ques- 
tion becomes impossible. " I and my Father are one." 
That the writer of the Fourth Gospel saw this 
is perfectly clear from what he has written else- 
where. Does the sentence I am going to quote 
have a more familiar and present value now we have 
been meditating together — listen. " Beloved, now 
are we sons of God, and it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be, but we know that when He — or 
rather, it — shall appear, we shall be like Him, for 
we shall see Him as He is." May I go on? u Be- 
hold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He 
shall dwell with them, and they shall be His people, 
and God Himself shall be with them, and be their 
God, and God shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes. And there shall be no more sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for 
the former things are passed away." 

tl When a soul has seen, 
By the means of evil that good is best, 



3o 4 ONENESS WITH GOD 

And through earth and its noise what is heaven's serene, 

When our faith in the same has stood the test, 

Why the child grown man you burn the rod 

The uses of labour are surely done, 

There remaineth a rest for the people of God, 

And I have had troubles enough for one." 

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is 
one and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
strength, and with all thy mind." Here is the rule 
and the way of life to men who have learned to 
know that love is the fulfilling of the law, the funda- 
mental secret of the universe. All is love, all is 
God. " I and My Father are one." 

I say, then, this is oar hope and this is the 
meaning of our life, with all its light and shadow, 
sorrow and joy, good and ill. I am talking to you 
very quietly to-night, as though there were but one 
person present, and we are conversing heart to 
heart upon the deep things of life. We are — 
permit the paradox — one and all, in living our life, 
struggling back to a place we have never left in 
the heart of God. Bad as you are, many of you, 
foolish as you may be, sin-stained as you know 
yourselves to be, God has never let you go. It 
was a sinful man who wrote, " Whither shall I go 
from Thy spirit, whither shall I flee from Thy 
presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art 
there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art 
there." " I and My Father are one." To Him, 
amidst our sins, are His children dear. 



ONENESS WITH GOD 305 

Now, brethren, I have unfolded my theme, and 
I trust you see my meaning. I want to know 
whether we understand Christ's purpose in uttering 
this sentence. He did not utter it to glorify Him- 
self. He did not wrangle with the Jews to gain 
a dialectical victory. He was aiming at something. 
What was it? Let the context tell. If, said He, 
you have said of the great ones of the earth, the 
great and the good, Ye are gods — and it is a phrase 
that often springs to our lips ; we use it even now 
when we see one whose moral stature is higher 
than his fellows, a godlike man — if you use that 
phrase concerning them, may I not humbly claim 
it for one whom God hath sanctified and sent to 
bring you into life. Learn it well. The works 
do testify that " I am the way, the truth, and the 
life." Every man may enter into this experience 
of the oneness of God. Even very ordinary human 
nature has had power with some of you to touch 
at least a corner of this life. I remember one 
night in particular when I stood at this desk, as 
I am standing now, a young fellow sat upon my 
right in the chair nearest to me, and he afterwards 
came to tell me this. I give the substance of his 
words. "I came into the Church that night 
with a heavy burden on my conscience, and a clammy 
fear gripping at my heart. I was struggling as 
it seemed in vain and in awful dread of falling 
before a certain temptation. I came there hoping 
that the preacher might turn to me and speak." 



306 ONENESS WITH GOD 

It just happened that when the service was over 
I did turn, a thing I do not do once in a hundred 
times, and spoke a word to the one who sat nearest 
to me in our common worship. I little knew what 
was taking place. Idealising the preacher whom 
he thought he knew, he felt as if new strength 
had entered into him. He fought his battle on 
the morrow. He felt as if it were already won. 
He felt as if he could take heart of grace and try- 
again. Where do you think the real strength came 
from? It is often so in ordinary life. That man 
was lifted nearer God because he was in the house 
of prayer; and as he fell under the shadow of 
another's spirit, did deity shine through humanity, 
very ordinary humanity, or did it not? Let the 
works be the evidence. 

Here is a man who owes everything he has in 
the world to the example of a good mother or a 
good father. You would have gone to the devil 
long ago, young man, but on the threshold of the 
gambling hell or of the liquor saloon, which does 
a roaring trade on a Sunday night, you were arrested 
by an invisible hand. Your mother's arm stretched 
a long way, but it was strong enough to draw you 
back from the things of hell. Be thankful now 
you are stronger, be thankful — and you are thank- 
ful — that your manhood is what it is. The life, 
pure, consecrated life, had power to bring you up 
to God. Did God shine through such a life or 
did He not? I have heard men say of father, 



ONENESS WITH GOD 307 

mother, friend, " My mother's life, my father's 
manhood, my friend's goodness persuaded me — 
even though my evil self would have ruined me — 
persuaded me God reigneth." Seeking for a symbol 
for God, you need not go beyond your own home 
and your mother. Say, " She and my Father are 
one," in the love that she bears for you and the 
goodness that saved you. U I and My Father are 
one." 

Even in ordinary humanity, then, such as I have 
instanced, we have our sacred seasons when we 
feel that humanity has not lost everything, and 
all opportunity of showing God. I have looked on 
the faces of men whose kindred I knew, and yet 
who had sunken in infamy. I remember a man 
whose face was a mass of corruption coming to me 
without disclosing his identity, but I knew him, I 
knew him for the man I was in search of, and why ? 
It was because I saw his father's face, I recognised 
his brother's features. He had done his best to 
drink them into oblivion, but he had not managed 
it quite. They were not gone. The air of a 
gentleman was still upon him, and the noble dignity 
of those who bore his name and were of his lineage 
was evident in his very demeanour. A poor 
drunkard, and perhaps worse, but there was shining 
through him a noble humanity, figure of deity, 
the "love that will not let me go." 

But the other day, in that terrible war that is 
taking place in the Far East, an august event took 



308 ONENESS WITH GOD 

place. Two Japanese officers arrested as spies, 
condemned to death, asked as a last privilege to 
be permitted to give what little worldly wealth they 
possessed for the sake of the widows and children 
of the Russian dead. The very startling surprise of 
the deed stirred a chord of sympathy and admiration 
for our common humanity in those who heard the 
offer and in us who read it. What was it ? Amid 
the horror of war, the blackness and hideousness 
of the devilry in that hell upon earth, in that little 
corner of the Far East, shone out a bright star. 
Humanity was capable of something divine in a 
golden moment. I have seen as much myself in 
the deeds, in the carriage of ordinary men and 
women, very ill to live with, people for whom in 
their everyday life one could not entertain or mani- 
fest much respect. I have seen the impulsive act 
of a bad man elevate him. I have seen the light 
of heaven dawn in beauty upon the face of one 
whose whole career had been for self-interest and 
for the things that perished, but that look spoke 
of heaven, not of earth. And, amongst the very 
worst with whom you have to deal, you will see 
from time to time, when the crisis is at hand, the 
manifestation of that which is worthy of God. 
What a man is in his best moments, that God has 
made him capable of being for ever. That he must 
and shall become, even though it be through pain. 
" I and My Father are one." 

One word of application. I would appeal to some 



ONENESS WITH GOD 309 

of the non-Churchgoers who are present. I do not 
say I am going to make you Churchgoers, but I 
wish I could make you good men. Here you come, 
brought perhaps by curiosity, to hear one who has 
never raised his voice to a shout since you entered 
the building, who has not uttered a sensational word, 
who has not spoken a sentence just for the sake of 
speaking. Hither you come, fresh from the great 
fight for bread, for a footing in the great world. 
You are supposed to take a poor view of humanity 
and its ways. You are pretty hard yourself, coarse, 
material, worldly. You are what would be called 
practical men. There is not much sentiment to 
spare, you have no vision of God and no aspiration 
for a better and a higher life. Do not be untrue 
to the very law of your own being. You know 
quite well in your heart of hearts you would rather 
be like Jesus than like what you are. If you 
knew the way out of the life you are living, not 
that it is so flagrantly bad, as the world judges, 
but if you knew your way to a better and you 
could go without struggle and without sacrifice, you 
would go. What is it that speaks thus? God 
has never left you, nor the Christ, the Christ that 
is within. Do you not feel that this is what the 
universe means ? Do you not realise that this is 
the purpose, the real purpose, of your poor little 
sinful failure of a life, that you may say, as Jesus 
said, "I and My Father are one." To be one with 
right, to be one with heroism, to be one with good- 



310 ONENESS WITH GOD 

ness, to be one with the manhood that you can 
respect and reverence and adore, that should be 
the aim and object of your life. Do you know the 
way to it ? I think, though you may say I have lapsed 
back into conventionality and taken too much for 
granted, I can take you to no better place than the 
cross of Christ. What did it cost Him to follow 
the right ? What did it mean to live what He felt 
to be the true life of oneness with God ? It meant 
Calvary. Ah, there is the place to which poor 
human nature is unwilling to go. It might cost 
you a Calvary to turn from your corrupt, evil ways 
to-morrow and go right, and you are not prepared 
for the price. Then be aware that as you turn 
your back upon the light, as you repudiate the 
Christ you are not merely repudiating a creed, you 
are repudiating the ideal. You have deliberately 
chosen the lower, not that which is humanity, but 
that which is bestial. You have turned your back 
upon heaven, you are choosing hell. Do you think 
that is the way to peace and rest and joy? It can 
never be. Face round, cost what it may in soul 
agony. It is worth all that you can give to be able 
to say with a clear conscience and a humble heart, 
" I and My Father are one." 

Here is another, a sore, burdened, stricken heart. 
What are you doing in the City Temple? You 
have never been so very religious before, and you 
have not come here because we talk platitudes, no, 
nor because we take for granted the experience of 



ONENESS WITH GOD 311 

other men. It may be an inspiration, but we will 
not strike the false note of pretending it is ours 
unless it is. Hither you have come, filled with 
vengeful, angry, evil thoughts. You have failed in 
life, not entirely of your own fault. You have 
suffered injury, you have no vision of God, any 
more than the worldly man whom I have just 
described. You are groping along in the dark. 
Every blow you strike, remember, even in your 
thought, recoils upon you. You deny your own 
dignity, you crush down your own divinity. The 
first thing for you to do, and this night, is to get 
at one, not with the world, but with God, to get 
the better, not of the man who struck you down, 
but of the evil self that resents the injury. Rise up, 
child of the highest, though Apollyon meet you in 
the Valley of Humiliation, defy him in the name of 
the Lord of Hosts. That you have a hard battle to 
fight I know. It is no new thing in the history of 
mankind, and I would have you aware that you are 
not alone in doing it. " All nature," as Henry 
Drummond says, " is on the side of the man who 
tries to rise." Take courage for to-morrow. Fear 
nothing. Calvary is never the last word. Be 
brave and faithful, for on the dark waters of life 
there sails another barque than yours. It may be 
hidden from you by the shadows, but its Captain 
is the Son of God. Jesus has not forgotten His 
own humanity, nor has He ceased to care for yours. 
He can move Heaven for you, and He will. 



312 ONENESS WITH GOD 

I am calling for a very simple decision. Say " I 
will go right, I will be true. If I have never been 
at ease with my own conscience and with God 
before, I mean to be now." "I and My Father are 
one." That vow is registered in heaven, and it is 
heard by One Who has never failed the seeking 
soul. 

" Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove ; 

*' Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, Thou : 
Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 



INWARD TRUTH 



An interesting story goes along with this sermon. Attendants 
at the City Temple may remember that on the Thursday following 
the preaching of this particular sermon, I read and spoke about 
the poignant letter of one who had felt himself described in the 
experience here set forth. He was an educated man, and his way 
of telling his story showed that he possessed great natural ability. 
He declared his intention of ending his own life, which had 
become intolerable through his depressing failures. He had 
somehow slipped down gradually from a position of trust and 
importance ; had ceased to be respected by his friends ; was 
looked upon as a burden ; was shunned by his own family ; even 
his children had learned to look upon him with the world's eyes. 
The keenest thrust of all was that he now saw, or fancied he saw, 
a change in his wife's attitude towards him. This was not 
wonderful, he declared, for though she had been a brave, faithful, 
uncomplaining friend, she could hardly fail to see him at length as 
her children saw him. He made no appeal for help, and did not 
even furnish his address. The letter, as a whole, is worth quoting, 
but the closing sentence is sufficient to show its purport : — 
" If my epitaph were to be written it would be : Here lies one 
who trifled with life, who had abundant opportunities for usefulness 
and honour, who might have been a power for God, a blessing to 
humanity and others, a witness for righteousness, but who was none 
of these because he lacked — Inward Truth." 

This letter became my subject and my sermon on the follow- 
ing Thursday ; and the writer, broken down by the unexpected 
declaration of God's mercy and love, came to me afterwards, as 
I had asked him to do. Half a dozen hands were held out by 
the city men present to give him a fresh start. No one had been 
asked to help, but the help was freely given by good men. My 
colleague, Mr Badger, acted as intermediary, as he has done in 
many similar cases, with the result that to-day this gentleman is 
not only doing well in the world, but is helping others to under- 
stand the meaning of Inward Truth. He was well worth the 
miracle wrought by our Heavenly Father on his behalf. 



XVIII 

" Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts." — Psalm li. 6. 

The 51st Psalm is a hymn of penitence, and is said 
to have been written by King David after the 
greatest folly and the darkest sin of his life. It is 
possible that he was not the author, but, whether 
he was or not, this utterance of sorrowing self- 
accusation has become intimately associated with all 
such spiritual moods as his, and has woven itself into 
our hearts and experience. It is a prayer of singular 
beauty as well as moral depth and religious signi- 
ficance. The Psalmist ignores the question of 
penalty for his misdoings, and they were black 
enough : it is God he wants and the purity he has 
lost. a The sacrifices of God," he says, "are a 
broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O 
God, Thou wilt not despise." 

This utterance explains the meaning of the phrase 
which is our text. No external act counts for any- 
thing ; God measures by the inner Tightness — a 
heart right with God and goodness, purity and 
righteousness. The prayer of the Psalmist is, 
" Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a 
right spirit within me." 

In these days the sense of sin is somewhat lightly 

315 



316 INWARD TRUTH 

held by many people, while in others it seems to be 
entirely absent. Nevertheless, there is in every man 
a something which in its protest for truth comes 
very near to the lost sense of sin. I am going to try 
to show you what this something is. 

The word "truth" in our text refers to moral 
truth. Truth is one and indivisible, but it has many 
aspects. For example, suppose I could hand a rose 
to three such men as Professor Huxley, John 
Ruskin, and C. H. Spurgeon, and ask them to say 
what they knew about it or thought concerning it. 
Professor Huxley — I purposely choose him, because 
he was a man of sterling worth and high moral 
character as well as a great scientist and accomplished 
botanist — would instantly think of the structure of 
the rose, and tell us about its anatomy ; in fact, his 
knowledge of natural law was so profound that from 
his acquaintance with the rose the professor could 
infer the universe if he had not seen it. Mr Ruskin 
would speak quite differently. We know, from the 
eloquence of his writings, the charm and the magic 
of his work, that his first thought would be concern- 
ing the beauty of the flower ; a universe of beauty 
would be suggested to him by the simple rose. 
Remember, the rose is but a symbol ; it stands for 
the glorious, infinite unity, and to John Ruskin that 
unity would breathe beauty. What of Mr Spurgeon ? 
It has been said of him that, in his maturest days, 
when he knew most about men and things, when he 
had drunk deepest of the cup of life, when his 



INWARD TRUTH 317 

experience was at its very richest, he was as simple 
as a child in his handling of the things of God. 
They say that when he took a flower in his hand he 
would speak about it as though he had seen it 
made, had watched the fingers of God at work upon 
it. To him the flower would suggest a universe, 
too, just as to Huxley and to Ruskin, but it would 
be a universe of righteousness, a universe that told 
of the love of God. These three men would not be 
singing three different songs, telling three different 
truths ; they would be speaking one truth, but from 
three different points of view. To Huxley the rose 
would suggest the physical universe, to Ruskin the 
universe of beauty, and to Spurgeon the universe of 
moral truth ; but these three are one, and ultimately 
the meaning of the whole is, God is love as well as 
power, God is goodness as well as beauty. As 
Tennyson has it: — 

" Knowledge is the swallow on the lake 

That sees and stirs the surface shadow there, 
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm " ; 

or, as Keats puts it : — 

" * Beauty is truth, truth beauty ' — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

The physical, the intellectual, the moral universe are 
but one. 

When a man says, "I follow truth wheresoever I 
find it, and for that reason I am unable to accept 
your affirmations about God," I should like to test 



318 INWARD TRUTH 

him by the standard of Mr Spurgeon rather than 
that of Professor Huxley — sterling man though he 
undoubtedly was — and ask him, What kind of man 
are you ? for the universe will reflect to you exactly 
what you bring to it. What kind of life are you 
living? Are you a good man? Are you living a 
right life ? Are you even trying to do so ? Are 
you looking upward every day? Is duty nobly 
and faithfully done your watchword ? Then, though 
you may not be able to affirm much concerning 
the structure or the meaning of God's great mys- 
terious universe, you are at home in it, you have 
truth in the inward parts, and there God speaks to 
you. By saying I want to know what kind of 
man he is, I am inferring that he does not know 
his own world unless he himself is true at heart. 

We in this country profess a great love of truth 
in the shape of integrity, verbal trustworthiness, 
and so on ; our standard is not very exacting, but 
we could not get on at all without it. To business 
men such a proposition as that is self-evident. When 
I was in America last year I was somewhat amused 
by criticisms I heard of our business methods. 
More than once I met with the statement, "We 
are sorry to say that very often we cannot trust 
to British ways of doing business and what your 
business men say about their stock-in-trade." My 
reply was, " Oddly enough, that is exactly what I 
heard on the other side of the water about you ! " 
It is a matter of grave concern to both Britons and 



INWARD TRUTH 319 

Americans who love their country that in commerce 
there is not more of the virtue to which we pro- 
fess to attach so much importance. There is much 
trickiness and sharp practice in the places where 
you get your daily bread ; you have seen many 
mean and dirty actions in business life ; in fact, 
to the honest man life seems a continual fight 
against dishonesty. One has to confess that the 
standard of the world — though, thank God, it is 
better than it once was- — is still very low. You 
cannot measure a man's motives by what he says ; 
he may take the name of God upon his lips 
though in his heart he is not true. The issue lies 
deeper than a mere question, for instance, of dis- 
count on a bill. We say, after long acquaintance with 
an individual — and as a rule only long acquaintance 
justifies such statements — "So-and-so is a true man; 
I have proved him." Why do you use the word 
"true"? Because you know something about that 
man, though it might not be considered proof in 
a court of law. If you were asked to write a 
testimonial to his integrity, you would say some 
things at which a judge or prosecuting lawyer 
might laugh. But you have been down to the 
depths of your friend's being, and you know he 
rings true, because more than once he has been 
willing to suffer for truth, the world not knowing. 
It has been said of John Bright that his sincerity 
was proved by every possible test, and I think 
that was true. There are men in a humbler posi- 



320 INWARD TRUTH 

tion than that John Bright of whom it could be 
said that they are true to the depths; no mean 
or shabby action could proceed from such men, 
and we are grateful for their life and influence. 
Amongst my circle of friends I have more than 
one whom I feel to be true to the very core 
of his being — loyal, strong, noble, and good. Such 
men are worth more to their country than untold 
gold, for they help to make men; to be under 
the shadow of their influence stimulates one to 
the living of a nobler life. 

On the other hand, we know men who we feel 
are false, though we cannot always say why ; and 
here again our evidence in a court of law would 
be nonsuited. There are men whom you would 
not trust any further than you can see them ; you 
know somehow, by instinct of honest judgment, 
that these men would fail you in a crisis ; they 
could be depended on just as far as it suited their 
interest, and no further. Sometimes, by an accident, 
the essential falsity of a man's nature is revealed. 
A friend told me that he once received from a 
man, with whom he was dealing in business, a 
letter to this effect: "I find I overcharged you 
threepence on the invoice sent you yesterday. 
Please correct and return." Said my friend: "I 
determined to watch that man ; I wanted to see 
whether he was as particular about truth in the 
heart as he seemed to be about truth in the letter." 
Sure enough, later on, the man found himself in 



INWARD TRUTH 321 

a corner with his back to the wall, and it was not 
a question of pence but of pounds. That man in 
reality was a thief all the time. When I was in 
Scotland recently I went to a very interesting place, 
the Observatory at Paisley. I there saw an instru- 
ment for measuring earthquakes, a seismological 
register. A block of stone, twenty-four solid feet 
in depth, was thrust into the earth ; down and down 
it went, standing like an isolated column in the 
vacuum carefully preserved on every side of it. On 
the top a delicate instrument was poised, which 
actually wrote with a pencil a record of the vibra- 
tions and oscillations that were taking place in every 
part of the globe. Said the gentleman in charge, 
"If an earthquake were taking place in Japan its 
motion would be written here as faithfully as though 
we were on the spot to measure it." "Then what 
about the rumbles here in Paisley ? " said I. " You 
make noise enough in your streets : would they be 
registered by your instrument?" "No," was the 
reply. " We do not trouble about vibrations on the 
surface. We measure from the depths." That is 
the way to measure — truth in the inward parts. 

" Truth is within ourselves ; 

It takes no rise from outward things, 
Whate'er you may believe." 

We do not measure by a man's profession, but by 
what comes from the depths of his nature. A man 
who is as faithful in the shadow as in the light, as 



3 22 INWARD TRUTH 

faithful when it does not pay to be faithful at the 
time as when it does — that is the man to whom to 
commit your trust ; he was right with God ere he 
was right with you ; and if it came to be a question 
whether he should sacrifice you or truth — truth as 
Spurgeon understood it — it would be God he would 
choose, not you. 

" I could not love thee, dear, so much 
Loved I not honour more." 

There is something more than trivial sentimentality 
in that utterance. 

Before I come to closer dealings, I would just 
indicate wherein really consists the greatest value in 
all estimates of moral character. It is not merely a 
question of dealing between man and man. If we 
had nothing to preach about except iniquity, our 
pulpit message would be a poor one ; I mean 
un-equiry, by which a man does not deal straight 
with his fellows. That is not all, it is not the 
end, it is not really the beginning. It is sin with 
which we have to do — that is, a man's transgression 
against God, the thing that hides God from him. 
When you are dealing with iniquity you are really 
dealing at the same time with another factor deeper 
than any of the relations which a man holds with 
his fellows, and that is his relationship with God. 
Perhaps I address some men who have no very tight 
grip upon the truth that they have a relationship 
with God ; they would profess themselves uncertain, 



INWARD TRUTH 323 

agnostics, whatnot. " There may be a God, there 
may not ; but," you say, "I am trying to live a 
straight life." I wonder if you see how far your 
creed goes. A straight life — why, that means that 
you might some day have to endure the whole world 
of humanity shrieking shame upon you, isolating 
you, withering you with censure and with sarcasm, 
with opposition and abuse. Supposing you stood 
alone against the world, would you still try to live a 
" straight life ? " In your heart of hearts you feel 
you would. Do you know what you have affirmed 
now ? You have affirmed that truth lies deeper than 
human interest or human opinion ; that truth is 
eternal, and it comes from the depths. In other 
words, truth is God, righteousness ; this righteous- 
ness that you serve is the very nature of the 
All-Father. If a man is true to that in the heart 
of him, he can defy the whole organised universe ; 
for behind all, after all, God. 

It is from this deeper truth that the grandest 
achievements of history have always sprung. For 
that truth Mr Spurgeon would have gone to the 
stake cheerfully. Why ? Because he felt, as we 
feel, that in the long run and the last resort all 
humanity must be sacrificed if need be — I mean 
all friendship, all relation with it — rather than be 
false to what we feel is beneath humanity, greater 
than humanity, worthier than humanity — the truth 
of God. " My soul, be thou silent unto God." 
u Create in me a clean heart, O God ; and renew 



3 2 4 



INWARD TRUTH 



a right spirit within me." "Against Thee, Thee 
only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy 
sight." 

The Psalmist gauged accurately and described 
our own experience when he uttered those words. 
It is with God, when we come to real dealings with 
truth, that you and I hold relation. Perhaps I 
address a man who is right with the rest of 
humanity, but wrong with this mysterious entity of 
which I have spoken. To illustrate. Suppose Adolf 
Beck, of whom we have been hearing so much, were 
really guilty; suppose— as I doubt not some in- 
fatuated officials will insist — the crimes for which 
he was punished had been really committed by him ; 
how would he feel to-day with the whole country 
ringing with indignation on his behalf? Would 
you change places with him ? If, as you walked the 
streets, conscious of your guilt, honest men grasped 
your hands and uttered words of pity and admira- 
tion, I think that before the week was out you would 
want to put an end to your life. Suppose I address 
a man whose experience has been anything like that : 
you managed to vindicate yourself once when you 
knew that in the depths of you you were not true ; it 
was the eternal right you had offended ; with the 
eternal God you had yet something to do. Can 
you remember your waking thought in the morning 
after you had dreamed that your guilty act had never 
been committed, the awful voice that sounded in 
your heart, the voice that David heard, " Thou art 



INWARD TRUTH 325 

the man ! " You may deceive the whole world, but 
you cannot deceive that deeper self which is one with 
God. " Against Thee have I sinned. . . . Thou 
desirest truth in the inward parts." 

One word more of application. If I address a man 
of double life, a man with something evil huddled out 
of sight, I would like to speak to him, not a word of 
threatening denunciation, but of pity and pleading. 
That thing you are seeking to bury, that putrifying 
corpse, will come to light some day, like Eugene 
Aram's victim. It is showing itself now in all its 
hideousness to Him whom no evil can deceive. If 
your life is a lie, it would pay you better — I an- 
nounce no penalty — to get right with the truth, 
however much it may scorch you, than to persist in 
the lie that seems to screen you. There is a true 
reserve. Very few men will confess anything but 
surface stories about their lives ; as a rule they do 
not tell all the truth. Why should they? It all 
depends just what it is a man is keeping from the 
gaze of his fellows. If that which you are huddling 
away is something by which you are injuring another 
or the community, out with it. Pretence is not the 
just reserve that belongs to such men as John Knox 
and John Bright, men who are right with God and 
can afford to be silent with their fellows ; what you 
are keeping away is just that which God is showing 
forth in the terrible light of the world of spirit ; it 
is all already known. 

What about the man who is deceiving the people 



326 INWARD TRUTH 

to whom he owes most in the world? Husband, 
what about that faithful little woman at home whom 
you are deceiving every day of your life ? Young 
man, new to the great city, but old in its evils, what 
about those people in the village from which you 
came, who are telling tales of pride about you — that 
are all false, only they do not know it? What 
about those who are praising you for virtues you do 
not possess and for courses of action you have never 
taken ? What of those who denounce in your 
presence vices of others that are not so dark as 
yours ? What of those who hold you up as pattern 
and example, when you are the very opposite ? Oh, 
hideous travesty of life ! Can any man endure to 
live it? Truly the way of transgressors is hard, 
because it is a false thing. The truth and the truth 
only will make a man at peace with himself. If there 
is any vestige or shadow of truth left in you, any 
real manhood, you will be ashamed of being credited 
with merits that are not yours. But if you have 
ceased to feel, then you are sleeping the sleep of 
death. The very agony and shame which you feel 
when the truth is revealed is evidence that truth 
within you is not dead. What about that young 
fellow becoming entangled — it may be for the first 
time, and conscience gnawing at him all the while — 
in devious ways, keeping company he dare not con- 
fess, conforming to practices that he knows to be 
shameful and bad? You are a miserable wretch — 
you do not need anybody to tell you that. But in 



INWARD TRUTH 327 

time you will become callous and hardened ; the 
voice that now speaks within you will be stilled ; you 
have Truth down, as it were, helpless and at your 
mercy : you are throttling her, and by the time you 
have slain that heavenly guest you will find that you 
yourself were the victim, the helpless victim, of a 
ghastly sham that stands for you — that of wrong, of 
shame, of evil. You are a slow murderer. " He 
that sinneth against Me wrongeth his own soul." 
The conscience of David slumbered for a while ; 
so may yours, but only for a while. There was 
another voice that spoke through Nathan the prophet, 
the voice of the eternal right, that never can be stilled. 
You may stifle the voice of conscience, but the voice 
of God will speak again in time or in eternity. " Thou 
art the man ! " 

Make terms with righteousness even now ; get 
right with God at this moment, cost what it may. 
Turn round upon evil living if you have become its 
victim. I care not what the price may be, it is worth 
while. There is a way out of every moral entangle- 
ment and of every moral abyss. I have hardly named 
the name of Christ in this sermon ; but any man who 
sees the form of Christ before his eyes, when he 
thinks about the facts which I have just set before 
you, sees the answer to his prayer. " Whither shall 
I go from Thy spirit ? or whither shall I flee from 
Thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou 
art there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou 
art there." Whither shall I go ? Here is the way 



328 INWARD TRUTH 

and the truth and the life. If we confess our sins 
He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and 
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say 
we have no sin, we make Him a liar, and the truth 
is not in us. 









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